Re: Re: CULT: mulch/alfalfa and weed preventer

Grif,
I learned a herbicide lesson the hard way this year.  Last fall I sprayed
Treflan (active ingredient trifluralin, the same as Preen) in some new beds
to help with grass primarily.  To my delight--no grass or much of anything
else.   Also to my surprise and dismay the newly planted iris I purchased
did not grow at all in the virgin soil.  This summer I dug some of the most
pathetic up and found no roots!  An overdose of trifluralin will inhibit new
root growth.  I translplanted the worse-off plants and they have responded
nicely.  My application rate with a hose end sprayer involved some
calculation which I thought was close but apparently not close enough.  I
gues I should have spent more time reading directions and cautions--as much
as I dislike doing it.
Lesson learned.
Chuck Bunnell
Lafayette, IN
Region 6
Zone 5a-5b
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "J. Griffin Crump" <jgcrump@erols.com>
To: <iris@hort.net>
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2004 5:41 PM
Subject: [iris] 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
owhere  --
| 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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