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theuserformallyknownasd00d

Glyphosphate weed kill

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Hi everyone. I have a bottle of glyphosphate weeks killer my misso wants me to use on our mulched garden to kill the grass and weeds. We have already planted out 20-25 acacias around the boundry and the bottle says that it will not kill them aslong as the spray doesn't hit them. It also says it is non residual and won't effect the roots.

So... Even if I'm super careful and spray on a still day and wrap the plants in plastic bags, how close to the base of the tree should it be ok to use?

Or am I seriously putting my acacias in jeopardy? My other option Is to mix builders lime with water and try to PH swing the hell outta the weeds?

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i was under the impression it was absorbed through vegetative growth, or intrafoliarly or some fancy word, so, a bit of a splash on the trunk shouldn't kill it. if you are overly worried maybe get some more selective poison, but, probably not worth the effort or cost.

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Yeh the cost is what made me roll with the glyphosphate. I can get more selective grass/weed herbicides through the farm I work at but I have to buy by the barrel and it ain't cheap, not to mention the farm is organic so they probably wouldn't even let me get it delivered!

Thanks for your reply mate, hopefully your right and I just gotta keep the acacias spray free

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just remember that glyphosphates inhibit mycorrhizal fungi. bad news in my books.

i would be trying to remove those weeds manually.

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^^ Ditto - or heavy mulching or another method - on a small scale salt can work...

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Hey guys already laid 6" mulch down over 2 occasions, used cardboard, newspaper the list goes on.... If I didn't have to spray I wouldn't...

I am very interested on the salt idea, how much salt per litre? Would it work like the limewater? Limewater worked in the edging because I could heavily apply it. Unfortunately I am looking at a gazillion weeds with heads etc in neighbours yards and this is where they are coming from. No amount of pulling has slowed it down and the misso is getting mad because of the time I've spent weeding to no avail!

Obtuse, I agree mate, it's the last straw unless the salt method is viable. Lucky I have my patches already set up on private organic property ;)

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i know this will sound annoying & you've pretty much already addressed it but if you need to spray glypho on a mulched garden then you're doing it wrong..

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what weeds are they. a number of common weeds are in fact edible, great for salads, and some have medicinal properties. but some are also quite poisonous. identify what you have, and google how to manage them.

also work out a management system. pull them up where you can, remove seed heads as they develop, and mulching is brilliant. if you are consistent and methodical you can get control but not straight away.

Edited by obtuse
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How do I stop the 2 houses next to me spreading the seed heads to my place? Were talking a yard full blowing straight over ;)

Short of mowing them myself, not much can be done. I already spoke to them and that got me on the bad neighbours list...

I've been pulling each week by hand for a month, bout twice weekly. The only other thing I can think is my "bush mulch" was contaminated with seeds.

To (maybe) put my situation in context, I manage a small block of organic land (certified up til 3mths ago, we decided to let it go as the cost/return wasn't there) that has 200sq meters of fairly intensively, but not mono culture, planted vegetables. The thing is weed free and I know how to pull a weed and control an outbreak via a weekly/daily routine. I don't use any power tools on the whole 200mtrs, just a hand trowel and pitch fork.

But when u get home and the whole yard is teeming with weeds after doing everything including hand weeding and re mulching etc, sometimes you just don't know what else to do hence posting a quick thread... It will never be my intention to grow mushrooms on this land, i just want the bloody weeds to stop growing in my 6inches of mulch (rooing in the surface and upper layer of mulch)

;) thanks again ya'll, these are good points for anyone else reading none the less if they are in the same boat but haven't tried certain things to help.

I am also not worried about the poison being in "plant extracts" as this is also not my intention with the plants, I just wanted a drought proof yard after watering my vegie patch for 2hrs each arvo!

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I would rather use glyphosate than salting the soil, or liming. Salt and lime have their own set of issues, unless you were very sparing in application, as Tarenna suggested.

Glyphosate only works on actively photosynthesising tissue. So unless the truck is green (unlikely), the acacias will not die from it drifting onto the trunk.

As an example, I used glyphosate to kill off a large area of lawn that I converted to garden beds. The grass in the sun started dying within a week, the grass in heavy shade hardly yellowed at all, because without direct sunlight, photosynthetic activity was minimal. So the glyphosate must contact green, actively photosynthesisng tissues, to be effective.

If the sun ain't glowing and the leaves ain't growing, then the weed's ain't going when the glyphosate starts flowing!

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*eth sobs a little....

i can feel ya pain because i'm surrounded by weeds mate :(

the neighbours seem to like them (on two sides)and the public reserve next door to me on the the third boundary is mega mad weed mart. The council goes all napalm on them but they still come back. The napalm shits me because prior to that i sometimes would go forraging with my "Edible weeds and garden plants of melbourne" booklet in one hand -actually the three cornered leek and potato soup is one of my faves :wink:disco stu

I too try to manage and maintain but to no avail......*sobs a little more.....has another toke.....sobbing subsides a little.

This summer my plan is this.

I'm manually pulling out every last mutha weed by hand, then laying dowwn the mulch, then laying down a series of those cardboard discs that you find on pallets.

They are about a 1 metre in circumferance and thick cardboard and have never seen 1 weed breakthough them - i'm sure you've seen them. easy to obtain also normally for free -as long as you walk sexily and wink at the forkie.

Then pea straw or lucerne etc on top of that.

When i want to plant a plant/seedling etc i just use a trowel to poke a hole through everything to the soil .

good luck with eradicating them mang. I don't use any sprays around my backyard because there is too many latent, transient type visitors and we love the wildlife and the pussy.

editto: i thought i better add a relevant link to the little book i was/and have talked about before.

http://www.edibleweeds.com.au/

Edited by cheshire
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yeah i fee your pain too bro.. i personally can't see the point of anything but epic level sheet mulching/composting along with a truly epic array of biodiversity. smash it out to such an extreme degree, being very considered regarding species selection, that there is simply barely a single niche left in your whole space for any 'weed' to take hold.. & neatness truly is nothing but maintained disorder. It should be crazy & chaotic looking with hundreds of different species otherwise opportunistic plants will Always fill the multitude of niches you have conveniently provided for them..

figure out which of the 'weeds' may actually fit well into the overall epic biodiversity, don't fixate on them as being 'weeds' unless they are not useful or allelopathic or whatever, just let them take their place in the 'ecosystem'. if you have a reasonably smart species selection & an epic level of diversity the weeds simply won't have any niche to live in & the soil condition with begin to not favor 'weed' germination. Sheet mulching should be continuously layed down in areas where it is needed over the course of time etc.. there should never be any exposed soil..

serious space constraints can make this difficult sometimes if you are trying for cash crops of a single or just a few varieties though.. but if you are trying for cash crops of just a few things in a really small space then you're probably just asking for trouble imo..

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i think we need to remember that 'weed' is a subjective term & the only reason we have such 'problems' with them is our lack of understanding of ecological systems & a lack of desire to model on & work within ecological frameworks.. we all too often fixate on neatness & aesthetic ideals not realizing that these ideals are almost always completely opposed to ecosystemic principles. Principles which create, as a byproduct of their function, a well balanced system.. If we get biodiversity & modeled ecosystemic function right then the aesthetics fall into place.. thats why natural ecosystem just naturally look so beautiful..

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i'm not saying necessarily thats your problem P, it's just pretty much THE fundamental problem in almost all human plant production systems & is the main reason why company's like monsanto can dominate the world in such sinister & fucked up ways..

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Totally agree paradox. And that's my overall plan. My block originally had 1" soil and the rest was clay. Hence the acacias to first help loosen the soil blah blah.... Most if the current weeds are thistles and the weed style rockets/lactuca, but I'm simply not interested and would prefer to allow the acacias to establish and not look at unattractive and useless weeds in the meanwhile!

I guess this thread is ultimately, and possibly unfortunately, about aesthetics and keeping the leg over ability intact with the misso.

At my vegie patch we have a big chickweed and oxalis problem. I soon found these great weeds for leeks/spring onions etc to help get the long white stems as it helps completely block the lightt. This is what the market wants and I don't have to weed. Win win ;)

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Hey, nothing wrong with aesthetics. Suburban blocks are supposed to look nice. If your neighbours cared more about aesthetics and pulled out their fucking weeds then you probably wouldn't be in this situation as much :)

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to answer your original question, if you don't spray the above-ground parts of the acacia, and only apply a layer of droplets onto the foliage of the weeds eg don't hose them to the point of runoff, then your plants will be fine. i can pretty much guarantee it, or else there wouldn't be horticulturists of every kind around the world using glyphosate as part of their repertoire.

Edited by ThunderIdeal
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If your neighbours cared more about aesthetics and pulled out their fucking weeds then you probably wouldn't be in this situation as much :)

thats probably true but with or without annoying neighbors, theres googleplexs of 'weed' seeds fricken everywhere in every bit of soil on earth & they only germinate when a niche is open & the soil chemistry/biology is right for them to..

a definitely agree about suburban gardeners pulling out weeds.. they should start with their lawns! most detrimental & pointless weeds on the planet most of those grasses!

Edited by paradox
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I'm with Alice, and also ThunderIdeal on this one.

Don't salt the ground, bad idea. And glyphosate isn't necessarily the devil, and has it's uses. Just don't get any on the plants you don't wanna kill, pure and simple :)

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Your acacias should be fine as long as you're careful with the glyphosate as you describe.

But glyphosate can kill trees if deliberately applied to fresh wounds in the trunk. It's not only effective by spraying on leaves.

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Yeah not necessarily the devil & can be useful, personally I just don't want to feed it to my kids or have it anywhere near the food I grow & there's no reason it needs to be.. I also just have an aversion to being reliant on the industrial chemical industry to grow some veges. That's just me though of course, I'm a bit of a weirdo..

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I'm sorry for going on about this.. I have just spent a lot of my life pondering these things & to me our general atttitudes toward weeds just screams of a blatant misunderstanding of life on our planet & evolution itself.. I don't want to insult anyone, this is pretty universal & that may seem a dramatic but thats just how it is to me.. its the same kind of misunderstanding that is at the root of every epic problem that is presently killing us.. I dontvfor a second pretend I'm immune to that..

We act on blind assumptions that are derived from fundementally flawed reasoning regarding the function of the systems we are dealing with.

What we generally call 'weeds' are utterly fundemental mechanisms of the entire process of evolution of land based life on our planet. Without these species, life as we know it would not exist. you simply cannot seperate these botanical response mechanisms from the existence of almost all life on land. Without them the soils would not exist, they would almost never have been created in the first place & if they had, they would have all eroded to nothing billions of years ago.. to see the 'weeds' as something seperate from the soil itself is only due to a lack of a comprehensive education & understanding of these process'

The sprouting of pioneer & 'opportunistic' plant species is simply what the soil does when there is a disturbance ie niches are opened up & the chemical condition these species have evolved to germinate in response to is created, plain as that. If this wasnt a fundemental chracteristic of the soil cycle the soil simply would not exist.

When we cultivate the soil, pull out weeds, leave bare soil etc this is precisely the condition we are creating & 'weeds' WILL germinate. No two ways about it. & thank dawg they do otherwise we'd all be fucked.. we'd never have even existed.. know what I mean?

I probably aren't doing a good job of explaining it but can people see how, when relentlessly creating these germination conditions en masse through our ordinary gardening practices, when considering the fundemental nature of soil response mechanisms, how absurd it is to then turn around & get grumpy that 'weeds' have germinated?

I mean, if you walk into a pride of hungry lions with a rack of fresh lamb strapped to your head do you get angry cause you get torn to shreds? No, you are just an idiot.. right?

If you jump into a lake do you get angry that you are now wet? declare war on the water & employ some horridly toxic means of erradicating the water from the lake? No you just use a boat or enjoy a nice swim cause you understand the nature of water is wettness.. you know?

I don't know if I'm making much sense & with all that said.. I agree glypho isn't fundamentally evil or anything.. It can have its uses.. I just reckon those uses are a LOT less than is usually employed & can almost always be worked around with little trouble, just some good understanding of biological process' & a bit of ingenuity..

I don't think it should be anywhere near our food.. a bush regenerator or hort person is one thing, if they are willing to expose themselves to the stuff, but food production is quite another. In my opinion of course.. we all have different reasons & motivations.. unfortunately sometimes I just get passionate about the issue as I've spent a lot of years pondering it.. oh & I've already spent 7 hours waiting in an airport today with about 3 more to go ;) fuck typing on my phone Sux though!

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^ Amen.. dawg!!

I hear you entirely - thanks for investing the time in typing this great post on your phone, I greatly appreciate and admire the contribution.

peace

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Last year i was working on a project regarding mycorrhizal fungi. during collection of samples i had to battle though weeds to get the root samples i needed. when i was processing the roots, i noticed how the weed roots were wrapping themselves around the roots i was after.

and of course it hit me like a tonne of bricks, the exquisite interrelationships between plants through the mycorrhizal symbioses, not just the sharing of nutrients, but also other plant signals. there are papers about how mycorrhizal fungi turn on plant defense systems, and how mycorrhizae will direct nutrients to where they are needed. i had read about the idea in stamets and papers, but to see it in my hands was an epiphany.

from that point i felt the project was going in the wrong direction, that it was too focused, and leaving out that dynamic, considering that weeds are in fact important as they do in fact help tie ecosystems together. again as per Paradox, its only a matter of definition as to what a weed is.

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