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Re: planting preparation

What you are seeing is the immense seed reserve that is
present in most cropland fields.  And yes most corn and
soybean acres get sprayed with herbicides every year.  I am a
weed scientist by training and I have never seen a herbicide
work 100 percent all of the time.  Once some weeds escape and
set seed you are stuck with them for a long time.  Many weeds
are very prolific seed producers.
Sometimes it is necessary to allow several flushes of weeds to
emerge and then be killed before the seed reserve is
diminished significantly.

John Foust wrote:
> 
> I was stunned by the amount of dormant weed and grass seed in
> the former corn and winter wheat fields I've tried to convert to
> prairie.  I'm about five miles west of Jefferson, WI.
> 
> The first season after the crops, it was tilled and mowed at
> least once.  The next season, a spring burn, sprouted, Roundup-ed,
> waited, then I planted.  It seemed to go from dead to green again
> in six weeks...  foxtail, horseweed, other grasses and weeds
> I didn't plant.  The previous farmer had used atrazine in
> relatively low amounts - what was it doing, if this much seed
> was there?
> 
> The spots where what I planted "took" the best were the places
> where the construction crew had scraped a few inches of topsoil
> away to back-fill and level the area around my new home.  Almost
> makes me wish I'd done that to the entire 20 acres.
> 
> - John
> 
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