    This class will cover management practices to prevent and control weeds, including crop rotation, cultivation tools, and flame weeding.     

AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>This class will cover management practices to prevent and control weeds, including crop rotation, cultivation tools, and flame weeding. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Breakout Session 3

Stephen Meyer

Weed Management

Byron Smith

Veganically Grown: Our Journey to Certified and Beyond

Darren Greenfield

Timothy Hyde

Pest and Disease Control

Whitmar McConnell

The Ideal Soil: Biology

Larry Lesher

Cover Crops, Smother Crops, and Green Manures

Pamela Dysinger

The Very Best School

Edwin Dysinger

Fresh Produce in January

Shawn Speidel

Best Fertilizer Sourcing

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you that you've given us the opportunity to work with you in the Garden.

What a fantastic world and universe you have created, even after 6, 000 years of sin.

And we are dealing this afternoon with some of the challenges that we have in the garden, so we just pray that your wisdom will be here with us, that each person will feel they have gotten something that they can use in their gardens.

Okay, weed control is 1 of my favorite topics, and of course, You know, you read through the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy, you find out that the challenges that we have, you get that idea when God was talking to Adam and Eve right there after they had sinned.

The challenges that we have are for us to overcome.

And in that overcoming, it is recreating us into what we need to be, right?

So those problems are some real blessings, see, as part of the curse that is for man's and woman's sake, yeah.

And so weed control is a challenge, but we're told that When we see difficulties, we should use our God-given ability to overcome those difficulties.

It's not that it's not work, but we become masters of it because we, you know, use our minds.

So that's sort of the mindset that we want to have as we, as we go into this.

And then I'm sure, you know, each 1 of you represents some specific questions and weed problems.

This woman here is already smiling, so you get the idea.

Okay, here's factors that affect weed problems.

Soil imbalances, you know, you can see certain weeds like broom grass that tell you that it's poor soil.

My brother was pointing that out in the gardening class.

Broom grass in West Virginia, you know you can just see it growing on the hillside, you know that's poor acid soil.

1 time I was cruising along the freeway in northwestern Florida and I looked over here on the field over there and it was just red with sorrel, that was wild sorrel that was going to seed and it puts up these little spikes, red and so I just knew that's an acid soil over there.

And so certain soil conditions can encourage certain weeds So it's good.

Balance your soil with a cation exchange capacity type soil test, and that will maybe lessen your weed pressure.

But from my experience, I'm still working on getting my soil perfectly balanced.

Then, of course, the other thing is the amount of weed seeds in your soil.

So, you want to, you know, not let your weeds go to seed because you're going to be dealing with that for the next 7 years or something like that.

And that's where the thing on the bottom there, which I'll show in the next slide, tarps really helps with that.

Being careful, but you know, just careful cultivation is worth the extra work.

And maybe when you're rounding up organic matter, being careful about how many weed seeds it has in it.

Of course there's some parts of my garden have so many weed seeds in them already that a few more weed seeds you know won't make a whole lot of difference.

Then a really big thing is rotation okay which is a practice you know of changing the crop from year to year.

Don't just plant cotton, cotton, cotton or whatever.

But or don't just go corn, beans, corn, soybeans, but really have a rotation 34567 years.

And especially if you can have it in sod and then you break it out of sod.

The weeds that grow in your garden many times don't grow in a hay field where it's just kept mowed and it's a solid stand of grass.

It suppresses the pigweeds and the lamb's quarters and that kind of thing.

So when you break it out of sod, then you have many times many less weeds.

There can be other weeds in there, perennial weeds, sometimes like thistles in Colorado or something.

But that really can break the life cycle of those weeds.

But in many of our gardens, we don't have that luxury.

We're just very intensively growing a garden.

But there we're rotating and there's where you have this thing of alternating hard to weed crops Like carrots beets and so forth because they're slow germinating small little things that grow slowly The weeds just get ahead of them, and you try to pick them out of the weeds.

You alternate those with what we call cleaning crops or easy to keep weed free crops like potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes.

Those are ones in my garden that function that way because you can keep them well cultivated and then they grow up and shade out the weeds.

I mean sweet potatoes if you get them right, you know, they're just solid sea of leaves and in general you don't have a lot of things that will come up to except in Alabama sometimes certain kinds of nut grass would come up through but you can count on it.

You can look there in my garden in Alabama when I used to work at Uchi Pines.

Here you could see where I grew the sweet potatoes last year.

The next year, you go out there, just the sun's coming up, and it just shined.

And an area that had been tilled maybe a month before, and it hadn't had anything planted, or maybe it had something planted, but hadn't been cultivated for a few weeks.

And here are all these pigweeds and they turn toward the sun and the bottom of their leaves is red so that wherever the sweet potatoes weren't is just would tend to look red, but you could see where the sweet potatoes were is much cleaner.

And so then that's a good place to plant your carrots, see, because you have a lot less weeds to pick out by hand.

And of course I'm going to, you guys know I'm going to inevitably tell you about flame weeding which will help you with doing your carrots too.

So that's going to be, that's going to be a good share of the talk.

But I assume that's why some of you came here.

And then of course having a rest year in part of your garden, you can put it into a perennial green manure like alfalfa or clover, maybe red clover or something like that.

It does give you that climax stand and you can just keep it mowed for maybe from the fall of the sixth year.

And I'll show you how to do between the row living mulch where you plant the seeds while the crop of the sixth year is growing, let's say.

You sprinkle your seeds in there, so without any extra work, or very little extra work, you have planted your green manure.

Then it grows over the winter into the seventh year, the spring of the seventh year.

It comes up in the summer of that seventh year.

You just keep it mowed and that'll, you know, suppress all those annual weeds that want to come up and make seeds and so forth.

And of course, if it's a legume, it's fixing nitrogen and building organic matter in the roots and the tops and what you keep mowing off and then it grows over the winter of the seventh year and then you till it under and let it grow up in the spring of the eighth year And then you till it under and let it grow up in the spring of the eighth year.

And then you till it under, of course, in good time to where it'll break down before you need to plant your crop.

You get a good seedbed preparation, maybe a month before you're going to plant your crop and or 2 weeks if you have the right kind of equipment and so that green manure has been growing there for basically a year and a half plus.

Okay so you really built the organic matter, the nitrogen and if you have a relatively good okay soil, I can guarantee you if you did that, you can plant just about any nitrogen demanding crop like corn, cabbage, or whatever, and it's got the nitrogen it needs to just grow the crop.

You know, you could take a picture of it and use it in a chemical fertilizer advertisement.

Plus organic matter and weed suppression.

So that's a very good technique in the process you're, you know, resting your land, which is God's plan for sort of restocking the organic matter and the nutrients and all that good stuff.

So that's a very good, you know, these are intelligence tools that you're using.

See, it doesn't really take any more work, it's just planning, using your brains instead of just, you know, busting your knuckles on it, okay?

And here's another 1 that we've learned about from a man up in Canada, John Martin Fortier, and his book is back here.

I recommend if you're looking at Market Gardening, it's a very good, good book.

And, and also he's a good friend of mine.

I've never met him but he put my flame readers in his book.

He has 1 of my flame readers and he says more positive things about flame readers than I could even bring myself to say.

So I just, some days I just love him and other days I, he's sent me too many orders.

Here is when you're done with a crop in a certain area of your garden, okay, your early crops and you're so busy canning and freezing, it's easy to leave that, you know, part of your garden, it just grows up in weeds, see, the early peas or carrot bed or whatever you just it just grows up in weeds it was looking pretty nice at some point you had it all weeded but then as you're harvesting it that you didn't even notice those weeds are growing around the edges and before you know it it just made a whole bunch of seeds We have 1 weed in West Virginia called shaggy soldier that it just grows so fast.

We call it wild buckwheat there in West Virginia.

So you just put this tarp over the beds wherever that part is.

So you wouldn't necessarily have 1 tarp that's this big.

You could cut it up and you can get them from Jonathan Dysinger, okay.

And also you can get them locally from like southern states.

They call them silage tarps for putting over pit silos and they're usually white on 1 side and black on the other.

If you're concerned about it overheating your soil put the white side up if you but usually put the white side down and and it just encourages it's nice and moist and it breaks down those weeds so it's much easier than to till in whatever crop residues and weeds.

It's just like very mellow, and so it's a good way to kind of keep it there, all ready to till up whenever you're ready for your next crop.

And actually I've used tarps, not this particular kind of tarp, just a regular tarp, which I wouldn't recommend because they tend to break down in the sun and then they disintegrate into your soil, okay.

But I have spread that over areas that were just blackberries and we have ironweed and stickweed in West Virginia and I was just going in there and whack that with the weed whacker or the machete, Just whack it down.

I was gonna plant raspberries in that area But you know all these perennial weeds if you plant raspberries in there you have black bit wild blackberries growing in your raspberries Pretty soon you just till the whole thing under so so I just put this tarp over there for a good part of the of the summer Okay, or?

The year before I was gonna plant my raspberries either.

I was gonna plant them in the fall or in the spring.

So I put it in the summer, just put it over there and after you need to do it for a month or 2 during the active growing time, preferably in the springtime when the blackberries and so forth have been saving up their energy over the winter and now they need to get more energy so they put up their leaves.

Well, if you put the tarp over and they can't get any more energy then their roots will die but any time of the year when you have a month or 2 of warm growing season time and you don't let them get any light they'll give out except some weeds are very tough so you know, you'll learn what you need to do to your weeds and your climate.

Anyway, I put it over this for a month or 2 and boy, you take it off there and everything's dead and it's just a whole bunch of organic matter and you just, you know, plant your, till your strip there and plant your raspberries and it's just taking care of it all those perennial weeds gone.

I mean there might be some weed seeds in there stickweed and ironweed but it really is a good way to cycle a wild you know West Virginia corner of your garden or new area into perennial berries and fruits.

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Series

Breakout Session 3

Weed Management

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Plenary

Free Clinics: Willing Service Inspires Willing Changes

38m

Morning Devotionals

The Sabbath

29m

Callie Williams Weekend

How to Actually Know God’s Will for Your Life

33m

Mantra Meditation is Self Hypnosis

5m

Health Evangelism- A Teamwork In Action and How To Start

1h 17m

How to Have a Newstart- Part 2

37m

No Longer Alone

45m

Joy Born at Bethlehem

46m

Hebrews 11- Faith

09 The Faith of Joseph Part 1

38m

Home Gardening

5- Organic Weed Management

46m

Medical and Dental - Brainstorming for practical application

24m

Sound Doctrine