Just a silly question guys and gals... :P
when you cover your weedy plot with say old carpet or black plastic, how long do you have to wait until A) the weeds are dead and B) the plot is workable?
Just wondering really as i hopefully get my plot in october and after seeing the allotment site yesterday it looks as if i am gonna have some hard work ahead of me!
Jemma x
How long have you got ;D
A season is supposed to do a lot of good, 2 is better. It's not neccessarily all wasted time as you can plant some things through or on mulches.
Jeremy
great! no quick fix then ;)
thanks J
when i got mine a few months ago it was waist high in grasses and had 2 huge masses of brambles!
tis at least flat now and im digging mine over.
gonna cover it in some huge plastic sheets ive got for a couple of months then re-dig and hoe in the new year.
Hi,
I would suggest if the site has been neglected and while stuff is still growing with lots of green, Give it a good spray with roundup or glyphosphate.
This doesn't leach in to soil and will kill the weeds roots and all..
If you just cover the weeds up as in bindweed,couch etc the roots will keep growing under covering..
They will be blanched but still alive..
If you do spray make sure you wait for a dry day so at least 6 hours without rain after spraying..
3-4 weeks later when all top stuff has died back you can then rake it up and dig the garden. All roots wil be dead.
You can then set the site if you wish.cheers ..Jim..
Growmore, if you think that Glyphosate is harmless to the environment (and your health if you use it in your lottie) I suggest that you read the following
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/acrylamide.php
Definitely not for the organically minded
I am in the middle of digging my allotment as I don't like to use chemicals .
My plot has not been in use for a few years and last years the weeds whre taller than my self ( i am 5ft 2)
It's hard work and I know I will have to dig it again to remove the weeds roots.
On the plus side I am keeping fit :)
Mags
Hugh,
I read the AMERICAN report You put the link on to..
I understand this was a report done on Genitically Modified(GM) Food crops being sprayed and then eaten..
I was not saying grow GM vegetables and then spray and eat them.
I said spray it on weeds..Which you don't eat. To clear a plot..
I am totally against Genetically modified crops which are modified to be impervious to certain herbicides..
Because in my opinion some smart Crazy scientists decided to modify certain crops so they could be sprayed with glyphosphate and it have no effect on them whilst killing all weeds around them.
Or treat growing medium so only GM crops would grow in them.
There is a world of difference to this and me using Roundup or Glyphosphate to clear a plot of bindweed,brambles or couch.. Jim
I agree with Growmore. You are more likely to get ground contamination from carpets that are of mixed man made none biogradable fibers covered with diferent dyes and sprayed with stain free coatings. Not to mention foam backed carpets or even underlay . Carpets get wet heavy and are a haven for overwintering slugs, snales etc.
Good Luck
Alan
No, Jim. This is not a report on GM Foods at all, it is a report on Toxic Acrylamides in Cooked Foods Linked to Glyphosate, as the heading clearly states.
There is only one mention in the report which can be interpreted as referring to GM Crops, and that is the reference in Para 3 to "herbicide tolerant crops". However, if you read that paragraph more carefully you will see that it actually reads... "Cooking vegetables that had been exposed to the Glyphosate herbicide used with herbicide tolerant crops, or used during soil preparation for normal crops (my underlining and italics) would result in releasing more acrylamide"
And that, of course, is precisely what you are advocating in your original posting.
I quite agree as to the inadvisability of using old carpets, although over the short term the adverse effects would probably be no worse than wholesale spraying with glyphosate, but I would certainly use neither on my vegetable garden. If the weeds cannot be dug out then I would use either black polythene or a weedkiller based on ammonium sulphamate, which degrades in the soil after 6 weeks or so into ammonium sulphate.
Hi Hugh,
You said you would use ammonium sulphamate.I did a browse on the net for this.
Here is what I found.
"Great care should be taken when using ammonium sulphamate as this persists in the soil for some eight to 12 weeks depending on the soil type and seasonal conditions. It is active through the soil if soil-applied, and can kill lawns, trees and shrubs if their roots extend beneath soil treated with this herbicide. It is advisable to allow at least 12 weeks to elapse before any planting is done in the immediate vicinity."
"Symptoms of Ammonium sulphamate Exposure
- Eye and skin irritation.
- Respiratory tract irritation, cough, and shortness of breath.
- Nausea and vomiting."
Also on another site it said it is poisonous to animals and insects..
As well as corroding all sprayer parts which are metal..
After reading all this I think I will stick to my gyphospate .As I take my dogs to the lotty
and sprayers are expensive. Jim
yes well.....this debate goes on doesn't it.
I used Glyphosate to get rid of a trillion dandelions, docks and bindweed on ground i was clearing for next year and I had to do it under cover of darkness because the organic police were so vehement. Another elderly plotholder uses a few slug pellets which she sneaks onto the site in an unmarked tupperware container, waiting till no-one else is around. Surely we should have a little give and take here. I know there are many issues and this is nothing if not complex, but I am all for letting folk do their own thing in peace - we are only growing a few plants and, when you get down to it, who is really truly ecologically conscious - no cars, no foreign flights, no electric, no fridges.........not many of us, that's for sure so lets debate but not coerce.
cheers, suzy
Jim, I quite agree that no weedkiller is without its drawbacks - any choice of weedkiller is a choice between dangerous chemicals - which is why in my last posting I indicated that I would only use one as a last resort after trying to dig the weeds and the use of black plastic, rather than simply reaching for the Roundup in the first instance as you appeared to be suggesting.
However, the human health dangers of ammonium sulphamate all result from careless use and are completely avoidable, while the effects of Acrylamides are not. And your sprayer will only corrode if you don`t bother to wash it out thoroughly afterwards.
Well said Suzy,
Each to his own eh??.
I now have visions of ladies sneaking on to their lotties at night with silencers on their sprayers.
Standing back 20 yards with a catapult and shooting slug pellets on to their plot. :)
Or better still as in the film great escape ,having Hubby walk round with his pocket filled with slug pellets and a string to pull where he strategically wants to drop one ..
We have an access road running down side of our lotties and council man comes with his quad bike with a sprayer on back to keep road sides weed free filled with roundup..
I asked him why he wears an helmet on a 4 wheeler..he smiles and says "You never know what you get thrown at you riding this as you pass certain lotties" Cheers ..Jim
Jim, he was probably talking about the barrage of slugs all being thrown over the hedge by infuriated lottie holders who weren`t very good shots with their catapults. I use mine for squirrels, which are larger and thus easier to hit, and for ammunition I use all those tiny potatoes which are too small to scrub, scrape or peel.
l agree with growmore chemicals have to be used we will get nowhere without them, If preditors were so good why were sprays etc used in the first place (and do not say to improve profits) without them not enough food would have been produced. Floors are places for carpets not allotments
..........and my allotment is not place for chemicals that may be potentially unhealthy, even if it's not proven to be so.
It's all a personal choice really and since I don't know the first thing about chemicals I'd rather do without and spend a lot of time rooting on my knees.
I would point out that chemicals are not the saviours for poor management that the companies would have you believe. With the industrialised farming methods so prelevant in the mid-West of the U.S., and which have been copied elsewhere so extensively, the dominant management techniques have come to rely increasingly upon ever greater use of agro-chemicals. Following the widespread adoption of F1 hybrids by the mid-1950's the only way that the same yield per unit area could be maintained over the next four decades was with the amount of chemicals being applied doubling every decade- i.e. by 1995 16 times as many chemicals were being applied per acre as in 1955 but with no increase in yield. It was only with the introduction with, as promised by Monsanto et al., of GM crops that the increase in agrochemical use was reversed. Unfortunately, as promised by many environmental groups, 2003 saw the first year on year increase in agrochemical consumption in the U.S. over the previous year since 1995. This is due to the genetic modifications spreading into the environment and losing their effectiveness, as so many envisaged.
My point? Chemicals are no substitute for good management, be it in the field or the allotment.
May I be enlightened as to why the inaccurate claim that the report Hugh cited was American had to be emphasised with capitals?
I wish I had more time to read and be half as well informed as some of the posters on this thread.
Thanks for posting all this information, confusing as it may be, after all it's our health we want to protect. I realize that info may be biassed or incomplete, depending on the source but one piece of conflicting information does not always disprove another in my view. All information is valuable and we have to find our own thruth from all the pieces of info we can get. To decide on what to use and what not on our lotties we need information and choose the lesser of possible evils.
I am very confused about genetic modification. I know the pollitically correct stand is to be against it.
A hypothetical scenario:
My corn always gets eaten by something, (not birds, I even netted it and this part is not hypothetical) probably rats. What if rats don't eat marygolds because they don't like the smell and they put that smell in my corn so they don't eat it but we don't notice it. There are other things that humans don't eat and rats do. Would it upset the natural balance anyway? My corn didn't grow there naturally either. Luckely I don't depend on growing corn to survive but there are people who do.
Any thoughts on that?
I know I may have opened a can of worms here hehehehe.
The information that I posted concerning the rise in application of pesticides came from a summary, published in the Weekly Market Bulletin, a broadsheet distributed by the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, of figures collected from the annual report of the American Agro-Chemical Manufacturers Association. The latter is a trade group dedicated to promoting the roles of it's members in the the production of food to both the public and, more importantly, legislators. They are a not a bunch of tree huggers!
Given that your corn plants are an introduced exotic then your local eco-system will not be adversely affected if rats don't eat your corn. However if you scale this scenario up to 1000's of hectares and utilise native species the results on the eco-system could be devastating. There is a lot of research being done now on introducing transgenic genes into trees, being grown for both their wood and pulping, to reduce damage from caterpillars. Once the vast forests of Europe and the Southern U.S. are rendered essentially barren to birds and other predators of caterpillars then the results on the eco-system could be far reaching.
Another reason for the increase in pesticide use last year may be found within the summary here:
http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Triple-Herbicide-Resistance-ISB.htm
Pfffffffft, it all seems so complicated.
Interesting link btw.
Gardnerj
Coming back to your original question I can only offer the advice of one who was in a similar position twelve months ago.
I want to be as organic as possible but accept a little give and take is needed. When I took on my plot it was infested with thistles, docks, bindweed and couchgrass. I bit the bullet and sprayed the entire plot with roundup.
I then dumped lots of horse poo on the plot to a) smother any remaining weeds and b) improve the soil structure. A week or so after applying the mulch I covered the plot in a combination of builder's membrane and carpet. Yes, the surviving weeds underneath are still there and quite pale but I've found them much easier to clean out.
Personally I would rather smother with carpet/ plastic than overdose my plot with nasty chemicals. The whole reason for me getting my plot is a).I don't have to buy the commercially-grown veg from the supermarket which has been doused in several types of chemicals & b) get legally mugged by the supermarket if I want to buy organically grown veg......also I don't need to cough up £30/month on gym fees.
CC