Explaining My Weed Control Program

Once again, here is my weed control program:

Zach’s IPM Approach to Eliminating Weeds

• Follow OCD habits and clip off every seed head from every weed in garden
• Manually dig up and turn over every weed in garden with a shovel
• Follow weed seed bank control cycle (I did this about 5 times!)
• Liberally irrigate entire garden
• Wait for dormant weed seeds to germinate
• Manually till them under when they are baby weeds
• Repeat

• Continue with a preventative weed control program
• Constantly monitor for weed germination
• Manually pull any straggler weeds
• Use smart planting techniques that will cut down weed seed germination and survivability
• Adjust program if needed based on monitoring observations

Look at all those seeds! Can you see why I clipped off every seed head?!?!

 

I’m kinda proud of this picture. It’s pretty cool. Even if they are weeds.

 

The four parts of an IPM program, as described by the EPA, are setting action thresholds, monitoring, prevention, and control.

In terms of the prevention and control parts, there are different approaches that can be taken.  The three main methods of prevention and control are cultural, mechanical, and chemical control.  Cultural control refers to practices you employ in growing your plants that can help prevent a pest.  This could be planting resistant varieties of plants or companion planting.  Mechanical control refers to physically removing pests.  This could be accomplished with a shovel, your hand, or a mechanical tiller.  Chemical control is a no brainer.  Chemical control means you spray a chemical in hopes of killing whatever pest you are trying to eliminate.

Lets look at my approach and see how my program fits perfectly into the real definition of IPM.

Setting Action Thresholds – This is an idea that is meant more for large scale agricultural farmers, as opposed to home gardeners.  However, we can still apply it to my plan!  Basically, my action threshold is zero tolerance.  Farmers need to see a certain percentage of infestation by a pest before they decide it is economical to control the pest.  I’m saying that my percentage is 0%.  One weed is too much for me.  I don’t want to give any weed a chance to multiply in my garden.

Monitoring – In my plan I said how I am going to monitor my garden for weeds.  This is extremely important.  How will you know when you need to take action if you never walk through your garden and monitor what the weeds are doing?  Then, monitoring does you no good if you do not react to what you see during your monitoring.  You need to react, and adjust your program based on what you see out in your garden.

Prevention – My weed seed bank control cycle is a perfect example of prevention.  Prevention usually refers to practices you follow when the pest is not present, that will help in the future when a pest tries to invade your garden.  If I did not follow my weed seed bank control cycle, the first time I watered my garden after planting, tons of weeds would germinate all at the same time, and smother all of my vegetables!  I am preventing this from happening by follow my weed seed bank control cycle.  I will also plant my vegetables so that they are capable of preventing seeds from thriving.  I will use close plant spacing so that the leaves of my vegetables shade the soil underneath.  In this way, I will be helping my vegetables out compete any weed that tries to germinate.

Control – Control means something you do when the pest is present in order to eliminate it.  In my case, I took my shovel and manually turned over any soil that had weeds growing in it.  This was a pain in the butt (and my back!), but it was worth it.  By turning them over, I exposed their roots to the sun, and killed them.  The fancy term for this is solarization.  This is an example of a mechanical control method.  In the future, if I see a weed, I will probably just pull it out with my hand.  This is another mechanical control method.

So, as you can see, my IPM weed control program is actually pretty extensive!  I’m not necessarily against spraying chemicals, I would just like to avoid it if I can.  That’s why my program is heavy in the cultural and mechanical control departments.

I’m interested to see if all my hard work will pay off with my IPM weed control program!