Summer is in full swing in central Kentucky! This is the first blog entry in a while, so bear with me as I update you on happenings in the program. First, I’d like to welcome Matthew Allen to the lab! Matthew is a recent UK grad who has been working with Dr. Bob Pearce in his tobacco extension program for the past few years. He brings a great set of skills and a fun attitude to the weed science program. Here he is (on the right) with Dr. Ole Wendroth (on the left) after digging some holes in the field. Dr. Wendroth is a soil physicist in our department at UK. With his help, and with financial support from the department, we installed a number of soil moisture meters in the field after killing the cover crops and planting soybeans. These monitor soil moisture at different depths (down to two feet) and at numerous locations close to the surface (2”). We’ll be calibrating these sensors to our specific soil type to get plant available water and also installing tensiometers to measure water potential. With all these measurements, we’ll have a nice picture of how the cover crop residues alter soil moisture dynamics.
Soil moisture is certainly not lacking this year! It’s been a very wet summer in central Kentucky. This report from the National Weather Service in Louisville, KY, provides a nice summary of just how wet it’s been in 2015. The UKY weather station at Spindletop Farm recorded 10” of rain in June! A quick summary of what’s happened in this trial… we had about 7000 lbs of dry rye biomass produced per acre. In those rye plots, there was about 10 lbs of dry weed biomass per acre. Outside of the plots, where we didn’t burndown weeds in the fall, we had about 700 lbs of dry weed biomass per acre. We’re separating out the seeds from all those winter annuals to see how many seeds were returned to the soil in the spring. Soybean planting was a challenge as we didn’t quite have the right equipment to cut through the heavy rye residue. We were able to replant using some heavy duty trash cleaners, but still had a few planting issues. You can see some areas in the photos where the soybeans didn’t come up. Here is what other researchers with experience in this system have to say about planting (scroll down to the "planters" section): “Several features of a no-till planter are essential for such a high residue environment:
Regardless of our planting issues, the rye residue has provided excellent weed control. No soil residual herbicides were applied in the field. Look at how clean these plots were in mid-June (photo on the left) compared to plots that had winter annual weeds over the winter (photo on the right). (Remember that the beans in the rye plots were replanted two weeks after the other plots were planted.) The rye mulch does a great job of suppressing weeds through physical, biological, and chemical effects.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorErin Haramoto, University of Kentucky weed science Archives
May 2018
Categories |