Thanks, great suggestions. I will get the plow out again next year and start over. I have a few bags of WR left over for broadcasting into what's left of my beans. The land is in NW WI the wr over winters great. I didn't know that millet, I was wondering what that one plant was, never seen it before.
Whats going on with these weeds?
- Thread starter ruskbucks
- Start date
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
If you have really good soil, it may be able to handle the abuse of plowing and still be productive. If you are on marginal soil like many of us, that would just be doubling down on previous mistakes in my opinion.
Thanks,
Jack
Crimson n' Camo
5 year old buck +
Look at the soil and the plants as one entity......The native plants all serve some type of purpose. We may not understand what it is but they weren't just randomly put here without rhyme or reason. If certain plants are trying to take over or become very persistent then its likely due to an issue with the soil. There's much more to soil than just what's on a soil test......
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
And that entity is part of a larger entity including he animals that eat the plants.
What is new or has changed over time. There may be many things, but one thing mentioned was a change in planting technique where a plow was replaced by herbicide. Let's set aside the significant negative impacts to the soil with a bottom plow and think about what it does. It turns the soil over which kills ALL existing plants. If you have deep highly fertile soil with very good levels of OM, the disruption to the soil may have a relatively small impact on its productivity. That impact does add up over time as the process is repeated, but in the best soil, the productivity may not decline enough to be of concern over your lifetime, especially if you offset natural nutrient cycling with high inputs of commercial fertilizer. On the other hand, if you have marginal soils, those negative impacts may be devastating and cascading over a short time.
So, what happens when the OP turns from the plow to herbicides for killing vegetation. We think of gly and a few other herbicides as "non-selective" or "broad-spectrum" and we tend to think they kill everything equally like a plow, but they don't. For example, some plants are naturally resistant to gly. For example, at 2qt/ac gly will kill some of the clover plants in your field, but others will recover. At 3 qt/ac you kill the majority of the clover but probably not all of it.
My next question becomes, how well did the OP do at using herbicides? What plants are taking over? I could not tell from the pictures, but someone suggested a sedge. Is a sedge controlled by gly? At what rate? Was the sprayer calibrated? After 5 years of planting RR beans and spraying multiple times with gly, is it possible that the weeds that survived the gly, because they were more resistant naturally than those that died, had more offspring and passed on that resistance?
It is a complex system, and one size does not fit all. Since I've converted my 2-bottom plow to a lawn ornament, I've had to learn a lot more about specific weeds. I've become more tolerant of weeds in general which has reduced my use of herbicides. At the same time I've become more focused on any weed that seems to becoming dominant in a field. It is becoming dominant most likely because I've removed the competition for it.
I'm just rambling and I have sympathy for the OP. I'm still going through something similar dealing with marestail. I'm switching to a Liberty generic for burn-down because of the how it controls my specific weed. I'll need to continually keep an eye out for other weeds becoming dominant in a field. I just hope the next weed that eventually becomes dominant is one that deer eat, love, and has good nutrition! (But then I guess it wouldn't really be a "weed" to a deer manager).
Thanks,
Jack
Crimson n' Camo
5 year old buck +
I would add that even if his field was great dirt that could withstand the abuse of the plow and still remain productive......there are still things that are lost like soil structure.....OM is still burned and the microbial community heavily impacted...etc....etc......While his base "dirt" may still support plant growth.....nature is still trying to repair and replace the components that have been lost that make it healthy, life filled "soil"
FarmerDan
5 year old buck +
I'm probably not going to add anything that hasn't already been specifically suggested or hinted at. There are only two factors at play here. One is the medium (the soil) you have to work with and the second is what you try to do in that medium. When the two match, it's a beautiful world. When they don't all kinds of problems arise. The latter is more common than the former.
Nobody here has all the answers you need. You are there. You can take these hints and suggestions and try to make some decision about how you want to approach it.
It's true what homerj said. What your soil is saying is an open question. These are questions for you to ponder. Is you soil well drained? I don't know about you, but where I am we've seen a LOT of rain in the last two years. Is you soil compacted? A wet compacted soil performs much differently than a dry compacted soil, not that in either case the situation is good. Is you soil thin? Dig a hole. You might be surprised at what you see. Hit water at 6-inches? Subsoil? Depth of top soil?
TreeDaddy knows the law! Over in another thread that BobinCT started, one about micronutrients, there's a great discussion about looking at the whole picture, that having one good feature in a plot (like high fertility) isn't enough.
https://www.acgmaterials.com/liebigs-law-minimum/
So, all this learning is painful. Some of the pain can be reduced by considering and acting on the suggestions you might find helpful. But, that's about all we can do for you. IMO, the best thing you can do is dig a hole.
