Cereal rye, triticale and oats are commonly used as cover crops in the Salinas Valley in fall grown (Aug/Sept to Oct/Nov) and overwintered (Oct/Nov to Feb/March) planting slots. A key issue for growers is when to terminate the cover crop. This boils down to availability of equipment or breaks in the weather. Those types of issues are unavoidable and usually take precedence in decision making. In this article, we describe the various stages of cover crop seed development so that growers can let their cereal cover crop grow as long as possible without the risk of it producing seed that would become a weed in subsequent vegetable crops. This will allow the carbon to nitrogen (C:N) ratio to increase as high as possible to maximize the input...