One of the most common walk-in questions we receive in the UCCE office is weed identification. Did you know that our website has a fantastic page for weed and invasive plant id? It can be found here.

Part of what makes this such a great resource is the variety of ways to search. You can search by plant names in alphabetical order – both by scientific name and common name. In addition you can flip through photos and find the name of the plant. The flip through section is separated into broad leaf varieties and grasses, sedges, and alliums varieties.

Regardless of how you find them, the photos show several shots of each plant. As often as possible, pictures at different life stages are provided.

After identifying your weed, further information is available with a click of the mouse!

Ventura County UCCE Staff Research Associate Maren Mochizuki shares with us more information about yellow nutsedge, and what is being done to help minimize the problems it causes to local growers.

Managing yellow nutsedge costs local growers many thousands of dollars per year (see previous blog posting on yellow nutsedge for more information). Nutsedge is sharp enough to poke through plastic mulch installed on strawberry and vegetable beds. Once a shoot germinates through plastic, it can produce underground storage structures for reproduction (tubers) so that even if the shoot is removed, many tubers remain to sprout into new plants.

Nutsedge through plastic

To block shoot germination and prevent the production of more tubers, we (Oleg Daugovish, Ventura County UCCE Farm Advisor and Maren Mochizuki, Ventura County UCCE Staff Research Associate, in collaboration with Reiter Affiliated Companies) installed mechanical barriers underneath the plastic mulch of strawberry beds, including Tyvek homewrap, landscape weed barrier mat, and a layer of recycled paper roll between two layers of plastic.

All of these barriers prevented germination of yellow nutsedge in commercial strawberry fields compared to control beds with no barriers, but the plastic/paper/plastic treatment has the lowest cost per acre. Minimizing production of yellow nutsedge tubers reduces weed-crop competition and costly hand-weeding, improving the grower’s bottom line.

Today our Staff Research Associate, Maren Mochizuki, will share with us a glimpse inside a recent day as our office works to better understand the growth patterns of the yellow nutsedge.

Yellow nutsedge is a difficult weed to control because the plant produces new shoots via underground stems called tubers (similar to a potato); a few plants can turn quickly into an infestation!  Costly and labor-intensive hand weeding has been the only means of management because current herbicides are not effective.

Strawberry bed with yellow nutsedge

To understand the underground growth of this weed, we (Oleg Daugovish, Ventura County UCCE Farm Advisor; Emmanuel Gonzalez, Ventura County UCCE Lab Assistant; and Maren Mochizuki, Ventura County UCCE Staff Research Associate) sliced a cross section of an infested strawberry bed.  We were hoping to answer the following questions: How deep are the tubers?  About how many tubers are produced from each shoot?

After cutting the cross section and pushing it onto a bed of nails to hold it, we were able to lift it onto the truck tailgate and drive it to a water source to wash a few cubic feet of soil from the nutsedge underground stem/root system.  We were surprised to find that the tubers were not as deep as we expected (no deeper than 8 inches) and we counted several hundred tubers from our cross section, or about 3 per plant.

Yellow nutsedge tubers

The research team has another multi-year study using mechanical barriers such as layering plastic mulch, then paper, and another layer of plastic prevents germination of yellow nutsedge in strawberry beds as they continue to develop ways to handle this problematic weed. The mechanical barrier study will be featured in tomorrow’s blog posting.

The University of California (UC) Statewide Master Gardener Program has recently developed a Web site for California’s home gardeners at http://groups.ucanr.org/cagardenweb/index.cfm – Advice to Grow By! This new site will be the UC gardening portal, extending UC research-based information about gardening, landscapes, and lawns. The site focuses on sustainable gardening practices and uses a question and answer format.

The Master Gardener website committee used the current California Master Gardener Handbook for structure and content. The site is incredibly informative and easy to follow.

Main categories on the navigation bar are:

Gardening basics * Your climate zone * Find your local Master Gardener * Pests, diseases, weeds * Vegetables * Nut & fruit trees & vines * Landscape trees, shrubs & vines * Lawns * Flowers * Indoor plants * Poisonous plants * Glossary * Classes & events

Another great feature on the home page of the site is “Your Weekly Gardening Tip – a UC Blog”. As the title suggests, a weekly gardening tip is provided to allow readers to easily access information pertaining to issues most likely of concern to readers at the time the tip was posted. As with the rest of the site, further related information is easily accessible.

Next time you have a question, or some extra time to simply enjoy learning, check it out. You’ll be glad you did!