Weed Management and Cultivation Handbook
Description
By Sam Oschwald Tilton
If you've got weeds but aren't sure how to get rid of them, this book is for you! It will tell you the difference between finger weeders, sweeps, and discs, and how to use them together with planning and best practices to keep weeds from getting out of hand.
This 30-page handbook offers a comprehensive, no-frills approach to cultivation for weed control. This manual presents many proven strategies and tools to use on your farm so you can have clean, weed-free fields. Successful farmers have used these strategies to reduce the weeds on their farm in a single season and over many years.
The first section focuses on the existing weed seedbank in the soil, looking at ways to keep weed seeds from sprouting in the first place. This involves understanding the life cycle of the weed species that you do have in order to control them.
It uses a "many small hammers" approach (instead of one big hammer like herbicides) to ecological weed management, using everything including tillage, crop rotation, cover cropping, mechanical cultivation, crop density and more to control weeds.
The second section talks about how to manage the weeds that do sprout, including cultivation timing and sequence, shallow cultivation, tools and cultivator set-up and adjustment. It will help you decide which tools will work best against which weeds under field conditions.
Anyone looking to set up a cultivation program should start here to identify their weeds and the strategies and tools that will work against them.
