Re: CULT: mulch/alfalfa and weed preventer

Several years ago, after being fed up with having to mix my own 6-24-24
fertilizer because the ready-mixed can't be obtained in the Washington area
(like so many things), I took the advice of Nancy Szmuriga, who had been using
Rabbit Chow as a top dressing on her seldom-turned urban beds in New Jersey.

Apply some in the fall, and again in the late winter/early spring.  It worked
very nicely.  I decided to incorporate it as a tilled-in mix in preparing new
beds, and again it worked very well.

Then, 2 years ago, my newly set-out seedling sprouts suddenly went nowhere  --
just sat there for months looking like they did when they were first set out,
and only one of the few hundred bloomed the following spring.  Subsequent to
that, somone of our list correspondents praised alfalfa but warned against the
use of Rabbit Chow, saying  --  if I remember correctly  -- that it contains
salt, which inhibits growth.  Looking at my seedlings, I wondered if that
explained the no-growth of a year's crop  --  that perhaps some kind of toxic
salt had been added to the Rabbit Chow recently, since it had been working
nicely up till that crop.  There was, however, another possibility  --  that
the pre-germinant weed controller I had used on the beds, "Snapshot", was the
culprit.  Again, however, I had been using it for some years without a
problem.  That year, however, my supplier had sent me a product with a new
name, "TG2" or something like that, the packaging and contents looking so
otherwise identical that I thought it was just a product name change.  So, I
pulled the left-over bag out of the shed and read the accompanying information
very, very carefully.  Sure enough, there was a warning to the effect: Don't
use on seedling beds.  I talked to my supplier and he apologized for sending
the wrong product  --  "Snapshot" was indeed still available  -- however, the
price had gone up from $135 for 50lbs to $189.  I decided to resume using
Preen.

This year I was scheduled to create several new beds and dig and renew some
old ones, so I decided to bite the bullet and pay the king's ransom for one
sack of the Snapshot.  (The area where I raise some of my seedlings is rife
with morning glorys, and Preen doesn't prevent them, but Snapshot does.)
Just in case, I read the Snapshot instructions very carefully, as I had, in
fact, when I first began using it.  And a good thing I did!  Here was a whole
new paragraph not only warning not to use Snapshot on seedling beds, but to
avoid using it on beds into which adult plants were to be set until the soil
had "cured" for some time (my word, not theirs).  In the past, I had used this
product in both situations for several seasons with no adverse consequences.
Apparently, whatever bad thing is in "TG2" has also now been put into
Snapshot.  So the wrapup on the pregerminant weedkillers is this:  I put the
Preen on the new seedling beds and the new transplant beds, and used the
Snapshot on the established beds.  Everything is working fine in both
situations, and when the morning glorys pop up in the beds awaiting the
transplants, they get a shot of Roundup.

So, now, what about the Rabbit Chow?  Even though I had by now concluded that
it had gotten a bum rap in Iris-talk and Iris-photos and had almost taken the
fall here for the real culprit, "TG2", I decided to experiment.  I mixed
alfalfa pellets into the soil of half of the new seedling beds and Rabbit Chow
into the other half.  Result?  They're both growing like gangbusters and I
can't see any difference between them.  What Rabbit Chow has that alfalfa
doesn't is antibiotics, so I'll be sticking with it.  --  Griff

zone 7 in Virginia

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