To Know About Weed Control
Tremendous progress has been made with chemical weed control in the last 30 years. While chemical weed control has been with us in some shape or form since the early 1900’s, it hasn’t been until the end of World War II that chemical weed control really come into its own.
In all the progress that has been accomplished in the 30-40 years the most neglected area of chemical weed control has been in the realm of home garden and flower production. It is true that chemical weed control has made big advances in commercial vegetable production for large areas where a single kind of a vegetable or flower is treated for the control of weeds.
However, in the home vegetable and flower garden, with many different kinds of vegetables and flowers, each with its own sensitivity to various specific chemicals, progress has been very slow. One row of vegetables or flowers may be highly susceptible to the chemical used in the next row. To mix small quantities, and to apply them carefully on a row, then mix another quantity of a different material for the row right next to it, presented an almost impossible task.
All too often, the joy of having a nice, neat, compact, beautiful, weed-free flower and vegetable garden is marred by the horrible apparition of weeds. These weeds must be controlled if the garden is to be neat and thrifty. Such weed control is tiresome, laborious and time consuming. Weed control in practically every vegetable and flower garden to date has been done the hard way – by hand – the hoe, the wheel hoe, and these supplemented by hand weeding.
Soil Fumigants
The coming of “temporary soil sterilization” or “soil fumigants” offered a lot of promise for the home gardener in regard to pest control. With these materials it is difficult to ascertain exactly what they will do to the soil in the future. However, their goal was to make both vegetable and flower gardening and planting of new lawns a much simpler and more enjoyable task in the future.
All “soil sterilization – fumigants” must be used as “pre-planting” treatments, that is before any desirable vegetables, flowers or lawn seed is planted. This is very important. Otherwise, they too will be severely injured or killed.
These materials likewise cannot be used among shallow perennial plants such as irises, tulips, chrysanthemums, peonies, currants, grapes, gooseberries, raspberries, and rhubarb.
These materials are primarily designed to kill annual weed seeds which are already in the soil. There is scarcely a square foot of our vegetable or flower garden soils which doesn’t contain tremendous numbers of weed seeds. These fumigants are intended to kill most of these weed seeds in the soil, so that they will not establish themselves as young plants and grow to become a nuisance in the flower or vegetable garden or in the new lawn. In order to avoid and keep these materials from children, it is good to have a chemical storage cabinet so that it will be safe.
Some of the products in the soil sterilants or fumigant market which controlled weed seed germination, fungi and nematodes, were methyl bromide, Vapam, granular Cyanamid and Mylone 85-W. These materials, and there were others, are known to have both weed seed killing powers as well as certain powers of killing or inhibiting undesirable fungi, insects and nematodes in the soil.
