Matthew Bley and I were out at Cold Spring Orchard last week, fertilizing the blueberries and collecting some data on weed growth. The bindweed is out, and although it may look small now, it is about to become severe. We also noticed a bittersweet vine poking up through the mulch – thank you to both [ Read More ]
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Winter Annual Weeds
If you are seeing plants in your field that are currently flowering – or even setting seed – they are probably winter annuals. Winter annual weeds germinate in the fall, flower in the early spring, set seed, and die by mid-summer (Fig. 1)1. See the UMass factsheet on weed lifecycles for more information on the [ Read More ]
Different pre-emergent herbicides have different application timing and soil cover requirements. I have heard that it would be nice to have charts organizing those herbicides by their requirements. Below I have put together those charts. The charts below only list one example herbicide for each pre-emergent active ingredient. The active ingredient of an herbicide is [ Read More ]
I want to be sure to cater my work to address the biggest weed management challenges that growers in Massachusetts are facing. So, as is the answer to many Extension questions, the first thing I wanted to do in my new role was to conduct a survey. Below are the summarized results of that survey [ Read More ]
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Bindweed control in blueberries
Managing bindweed in perennial crops like apples and blueberries is challenging. This has become clear even after only working as the weed science extension educator for four months. Colloquially, “bindweed,” can refer to several different species. Annual morningglories (Ipomoea spp.), annual wild buckwheat (Fallopia convolvulus), and perennial hedge (Calystegia sepium) and field (Convolvulus arvensis) bindweed [ Read More ]