With all the rain last year, even extending into August and now with the rains since December there is a lot of natural ground cover growing, When it gets out of hand, we call it weedy. It might still serve the purpose of protecting the ground from erosion, but it can become an impenetrable mess and if allowed to go into summer, a major fire hazard. In the case of some young orchard, the malva and mustard is bigger than the trees themselves. Getting control of them before they get woody and go to seed is easier earlier than later. So it's time to do something about them if you haven't done so already.

A common practice on flat ground is to mow the middles and then weed whack/whip the tree row up to and around the tree...

Although many of you are already well aware of the upcoming changes to pesticide labels related to the Endangered Species Act, many are not. A quick background can be found in a Weed Science Society of America (WSSA) press release from last year (link here). You can also get a great deal of information from the WSSA web resource on the topic https://wssa.net/endangered-species/

Today I wanted to share a WSSA link to a webinar presentation "Endangered Species Act and Pesticides: an Example" made by Dr. Bill Chism who is the chair of the WSSA ESA Committee (I'm also on that...

Several of us are part of a multi-state project on electrical weed control in organic blueberry and orchard crops. Tong Zhen is the lead grad student researcher on the UC Davis part of the project and we are working closely with our counterparts at Oregon State University (Marcelo Moretti and team) and Cornell University (Lynn Sosnoskie and team).

Tong wrote about our "first impressions" of the Zasso electrical weed control unit in 2022 and we included a demo of the equipment last year at the 2023 UC Weed Day. Tong's projects are just getting rolling for 2024 in blueberry,...

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