Along with identifying our plants during our monitoring state, it was hard to not avoid looking at all the weeds that were in the field. Previous to our experiment, the ground was made up of prostrate pig weed, red root pig weed, and lamb’s quarters. So for this week our main task is to spray like crazy and go on a mass killing spree of weeds. Since a good majority of our plants are grasses, we are able to spray with 2-4-D. 2-4-D is a spray chemical that kills all broad leaf plants, such as our weeds, and does not kill our grasses. However, the difficult part about spraying with 2-4-D is we need to avoid all our brassicas and plants that are broad leaf. Instead of spraying 2-4-D on brassicas and broad leaf plants, we need to go through and hand weed instead so we don’t kill the plant. There are sprays that just take care of grasses in brassicas and broad leaf’s, but most of our weeds are broad leaf plants. Here’s a couple of pictures of what we have had to deal with and all the weeds in our field.

As you can see we have a weed problem. However, from what I have been told and found, is this is pretty typical for a field that use to be made up of weeds and has not been touched. Most of the weeds, if they go to seed, can produce 1,000 of seeds per plant! No wonder they are hard to get rid of! Also, multiple applications are much necessary for these type of situations, but make sure you switch around with chemicals, that way the weeds don’t get immune to them. This will be our third time spraying these weeds and we probably won’t kill them all!

Weeding is just as important as the planting of the seeds. The biggest lesson I have learn this week is weeding should not be neglected and always put a cover crop down if you aren’t using a field, that way you don’t have weeds that take over. Here is some of us after shots of the dead weeds we killer this week.