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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] Effective control of galinsoga--fall stale beds

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  • From: Richard Moyer <ramoyer AT gmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Effective control of galinsoga--fall stale beds
  • Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:03:32 -0400

To agree with and expand on:
Pull it before it sets seed.  Have to be quick.  After a heavy rain, we go out on search and destroy missions.  Put plants in a bucket, then we dispose of in a poor pasture, where they do not cause much of a problem.  Be careful not to shake a bunch of seed off if plants are blooming, hence the buckets and careful instruction to workers.  Instead of open piles on the ground and carrying such piles for disposal, spreading seed as you go.

October freezes tend to kill a lot of young gallinsoga that comes up in our fall/winter beds of greens and cover crops.  Hence an early or normal frost can also be a blessing in killing this scourge, as well as late pigweed seedlings.  So light tillage a few weeks before killing frost/freezes helps germinate, then kill the young plants.  A stale bed killed with frost/freeze instead of heat.  And with the cold and shorter days, some weeds don't grow and bloom as fast as during the summer, so we have more time to destroy those plants if first hard freeze is delayed.  Makes me wonder if there were a way to spray/apply cold (instead of heat), controlled enough that it would kill the tender weeds, but not the most cold hardy crops.  Would help with August-planted fall crops.  Inventors?

For those with severe galinsoga problems, aka one to few plants left to fully set seed: what about creating a microclimate with a low tunnel to encourage it to germinate in fall, then removing the cover on nights with hard freezes, to kill it before it blooms.  Then perhaps till lightly/ scratch up the soil surface, water if needed, then cover again to recreate the soil temps to encourage more galinsoga seed germination.  In a sense we've done this before, unintentionally.

Due to successive 27 and 28 degree nights, the far end of my rutabaga plots are now contain delightfully dead, young galinsoga plants, a place where I did not control galinsoga over the summer.  Hopefully this is depleting the galinsoga seed bank in the soil, and the dead galinsoga plants can now slowly give back the nutrients they took from the rutabaga plants.

I tend to delay putting on my low tunnel covers (frost blankets), letting these first hard freezes kill the tender weeds.  Then the blankets when below 25F.

Unwittingly, when I put row covers on earlier, or left on during days in 50s and above, have created a microclimate that encouraged galinsoga to germinate later in the fall than it's use to, due to higher soil temps.  Hence the suggestion above to do this intentionally: a stale seed bed where fall, weed seed germination is aided by row cover/low tunnel, then death by freezing.

Someone noted that galinsoga seed does not survive that long, compared to some weeds.  Anyone know a chart/table that lists the survival times of weed seed in soil?

Thanks,
Richard Moyer
SW VA


Message: 5
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:29:04 -0400
From: "Beth Spaugh" <lists AT rhomestead.com>
Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Effective control of Galinsoga
To: "'Market Farming'" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <B26156DCF0404F89A213B833BD51EAFD@BethPC>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Flame weed, every few weeks for years, and wish we'd get a good frost



Beth Spaugh

Rehoboth Homestead, Peru NY

http://rhomestead.com      http://www.facebook.com/rhomestead



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