Quackgrass Infested Field to Garden in 1 Year
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- Опубликовано: 18 июн 2024
- A year ago we realized that Quack Grass (aka Couch Grass, Common Couch, Twitch Grass, Quick Grass, Quitch Grass, just quitch, Dog Grass, Quackgrass, Scutch Grass, and Witchgrass) wasn't a joke and we decided to spend a year battling it to make future years easier to manage. If you just ignore it, it will come to haunt you.. for ever. This is our 1 year update.
I have been battling quack on my small farm without poisons for over 30 years. I have had some success stories and total failures trying to manage it. Your approach towards erradication will be determined upon the size of your plot, when you hope to use that plot, when and how much rain falls from the sky in your part of the world, labor and tools available to you.
The key to success is planning and timing. My best advice is to erradicate it before you plant a single seed or transplant. This may take a year or two depending on the level of infestation but it will be time well spent.
One effective technique for me was to starve my quack to death by drying it out over the course of my summer. Plow it, disc it and proceed to chisel it to bring it to the soil surface every few weeks over the course of the summer. By late August with repeated chiseling and little rain it was mostly dead. You can mimic this technique with hand tools for small plots with forks, solaization, tarps, hands and knees, as already discussed but quack sod is going to test your back and large plots will break it😅 When I first started digging out quack sod with a fork I was lucky to do a 3 ft x 6 foot patch a day. I have met market gardners who told me they forked out over two acres of quack but I think their ability to do that depends on the density of the quack and the moistue content in their soil. A couple inches of rain in mid summer can easily dash any hopes of getting a handle on it and send one into a deep depression😢 Initially I wanted to maintain my 5 acre market garden with a bcs tiller but it quickly became apparent to me that my minimum tool would do a minimum job and likely exacerbate my quack problem. Quack thrives on rotary tillage at least in moist soils. I have not repeatedly rotary tilled quack throughout the summer but it sounds like it could work if kept up. Persistance and courage conquers all but the quack. You gotta respect the quack!
I've battled it for over a decade. I keep losing as it just keeps coming back from the perimeter. The next thing to try is sinking corrugated metal 2' down (or whatever the max depth of the rhizomes) along the garden perimeter to create a permanent physical barrier.
Oh, and a great alternative to the black silage tarp? Used lumber wrap! The large pallets of units of lumber that have the brand logo on the outside are typically black on the inside. Construction companies and truss companies throw them away! Free!
Not sure how you've done since, but I've heard clover is a good way to fight it. outcompetes it as it comes earlier AND it's excellent green manure for the soil!
I have the same problem with the stuff. I am going to till every week until spring starting tomorrow. I was going to sink 1 ft corrugated metal down on the perimeter. Then do 8 layers of overlapped cardboard that I will not wet. Finally put 18 inch raised beds on top with 18 inches of wood chips everywhere else.
A moat of pigs?...sounds extreme!
I battle this too
We use mulch and now we have rabbits to feed it to :)
We were mulching with wood chips but we found while it's easier to pull up rhizomes afterwards, the quackgrass seems to thrive in the moist loose environment and it made it worse 😡 horrible stuff.
@@philandhannahslittlefarm1464 I agree it took over my raised beds grew in from everywhere and grew over and under my landscape cloth easy
It even grows over my mulch and other weeds do too
Constant mulch is needed and pulling
Good job making progress on that grass. Sounds like a tough battle but hopefully your garden does well this year
So far it's going great!
I was wondering, if you could try a foot deep and a foot wide trench all around the garden to keep them out from coming in? Maybe just make small test area first. How much I understand they can't go deeper than a foot. However it has to be there all the time, which means people might fall and hurt their legs. Maybe cover with some metal grate?
How many times did you wind up tilling? I have about 8-900 square foot area in my suburban lot that is an old garden that was completely engulfed with quackgrass. I have a tiny little walkbehind tiller that I am going to become very familiar with.
We tilled at least 6 times in the main garden area and have zero quackgrass.
Would allowing goats or sheep to "overgraze" this type of grass be effective?
Cheapest unreasonable method: Dig it all by hand
Cheapest reasonable method: Black plastic/tarp as you are doing
Reasonably Cheaper but faster method: turn the soil then cover with the plastic
Expensive method: turn the soil then use a weed burner (you'll need several passes)
Expensive and Intrusive: Chemicals.
I'd suggest a combination of pigs as you did with turning the soil then covering it is the ultimate
Expensive method: turn the soil
Thanks for the reply. I have been using silage tarps quite a bit this year and found that as soon as I pull the tarps and start watering they always come back. Also silage tarps are very expensive.
Pigs take way too long and leave a huge mess not to mention that their manure is gross and needs to compost/breakdown for a while before growing.
Borrowing a tiller and tilling it in once every 3 weeks is much easier, does not take alot of time and costs nothing other than $15 of gas. I have almost 0 quackgrass where I used the tiller.
My way:
1) the vegetation is cut with a scythe and collected into a heap.
2) A 70 cm (broadness of your wheelbarrow + 15 cm) broad row of the uppermost layer, "the turf layer" (10 cm) is dug up and put aside.
3) Then the rest of the soil (20 cm?) under this first layer is dug up and put aside in a heap. This will be the future path, 70 cm broad and maybe 30 cm deep. The paths will later be filled with cardboard and vet straws and other biological materials.
3) Then the second row, 60 cm broad, is handled like the first.
4) The third 60 cm row, the uppermost layer, "the turf -layer" (10 cm) is dug up and put upside-down on the bottom of the second row. On that turf-layer is laid the turf-layer that was dug up first. Now there are two upside-down turf-layers on each other in the second row.
5) The fourth row is dug up. The fourth turf-layer is put upside down on the bottom of the third row. The soil of that row is put on the second row.
And so on. The fourth row will be a path between rows.
Like this:
1st row, a path - 2nd+3rd row, a bed - 4th row, a path - 5th+6th row, a bed - and so on. (_--_--_--_--_--_)
The result is:
- A path, 70 cm broad, 30 cm deep. (first row)
- Alongside this a raised bed that is 120 cm broad (second and third row)
- Then comes a path (70 cm) again, the next raised bed (120 cm) and so on. Like this: (_--_--_--_--_--_)
After this:
6) A spadeful of compost spread over every 3 meters of the rows. This is done in order to quick-start the work of the microbes.
7) Add grass and plants that are scythed earlier. You can also add this first; at de bottom of each bed. [Also mushroom/mycorrhiza if there is any available.]
Watering.
8) Add soil that has been taken aside earlier. 5-10 cm?
Watering.
9) Add brown cardboard in at least triple layers, so that there will not be any sunlight reaching the soil underneath, so there can not be any photosynthesis and the weed will die.
10) Add soil.
11) Add vet straw approx. 10 - 20 cm. Water again.
- Check for weeds every 3rd or 4th day.
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Fill all the paths (ditches) with straw up to the same level as the bed. It is a lot of straw, but it will keep the path moist and the moist path will keep the bed moist.
- If no ditch => the first quackgrass will come from outside in one or two weeks and everything you have done will be in vain and soon it will spread out to the other beds also. The ditches will also work as swales.
- If no straw or chipped wood in the ditches => The ditch and the sides of each bed will be dried out by the sun and wind.
Yes, it is a lot of work in the first year, but after that, it will be much easier.