- Author: Steve Orloff
The California Alfalfa Symposium was held last week for the first time ever in Long Beach to an audience of approximately 450 attendees. As usual, there was a wide range of alfalfa production, marketing and policy-related presentations. There were two weed-related presentations that might be of particular interest to weed practitioners and researchers. One presentation was Weed Management in Alfalfa: Where We've Been and Where We're Going by the author of this blog and another on New Herbicide Tools for Established Alfalfa by Farm Advisor Emeritus Mick Canevari. These were the best presentations of the entire conference! (Just kidding…of course.)
Information from these...
- Author: Cheryl Reynolds
An online course highlighting how pesticide resistance develops among pests is now available on the UC IPM Web site. Createdprimarily for pest control advisors and other licensed pesticide applicators, this course describes the mechanisms of resistance in pathogens, insects, and weeds and discusses ways to manage resistance within the different disciplines.
The online course is divided into three narrated presentations followed by a final test for each section. This course has been approved for 2 continuing education units in the “Other” category from the Department of Pesticide Regulation.
This course is based on a series of workshops held in Davis, Fresno, and at the Kearney Agricultural...
- Author: Lynn M. Sosnoskie
It's that time of year again. Time for egg-nog, time for gingerbread cookies, time for stringing outdoor lights that have become tangled up into a massive, intractable knot, and time for decorating the home and hearth with weeds.
What? Weeds?
Yes, weeds. That includes Christmas favorites of mistletoe, ivy, and poinsettia.
Mistletoe (Phoradendrom spp., Arceuthobium spp., Viscum spp.): Mistletoes are evergreen, flowering plants that parasitize other plants to acquire water and nutrients. Mistletoes can, collectively, infest many different species of trees, including: oaks, alders, birches, box elder, zelkova, cottonwood, walnut, some conifers, etc...and...
- Author: Lynn M. Sosnoskie
Irrigation is crucial for the production of melons in California. It facilitates seed germination, it is essential for crop growth and fruit production, and, for growers that apply pre-emergence herbicides, it is necessary for product activation.
Pre-plant irrigation (pre-irrigation) is used to develop an optimal planting bed for the crop, however, it can also stimulate weed seed germination. Knowing this, growers must be prepared to use pre-emergence (i.e. soil-applied, residual herbicides) or post-emergence (i.e. flaming, or foliar-applied herbicides) to reduce crop-weed competition. Early weed control is important; to maximize crop yields, young melons should remain weed-free for up to eight...
- Author: Lynn M. Sosnoskie
This blog was originally supposed to be an interesting article on Thanksgiving foods; specifically, a discussion about crops (i.e. squashes, onion, corn, carrots, parsnips, etc...) that traditionally accompany our Thursday turkey, as well as their weedy relatives.
However, I stumbled upon more thought-provoking article that I've chosen to share, instead.
The paper, 'Crops gone wild: evolution of weeds and invasives from domesticated ancestors', which was published in the journal 'Evolutionary Applications' (Norman C. Ellstrand (UC-Riverside) et al., 3:494-504) in 2010, can be accessed here.
The authors, who are...