Air October 17, 2001

Thank you Mark, and good morning everyone. We’re moving quickly through the month and the year. We’re halfway through October and Halloween is just two weeks away. Guess I’d better get started on Christmas cards or they won’t get sent out for a second year!

We are starting to get late enough into wheat planting time that it is probably time to start kicking up the planting rate a little bit. Any wheat seeding that you do after this weekend should be at about a 10% higher seeding rate. A lot of alfalfa had been getting quite a bit of growth on it. Even if it may have gotten a light frost, I doubt that we’ve had a hard enough freeze to put any alfalfa into dormancy yet, so I would certainly not want to be cutting any alfalfa yet. You want a good tall stand of alfalfa when it finally goes dormant. This means you should have good root reserves for winter survival and early season growth. Once it does go dormant apply about 40 pounds of phosphorus and seriously think about a dormant herbicide application this fall. With the stressed growing season the last two years and the more normal rainfall this fall, there are a lot of weeds and cheat coming on in many alfalfa fields. A dormant herbicide application this fall can really clean up that alfalfa stand and improve hay quality for next year. Speaking of hay quality, have you been taking hay samples yet and getting them analyzed? It’s time to get started on that or it’ll be winter before you know it. Something else that’s really been growing nicely this fall with those timely rains has been the musk thistle. Oh, I know you’ve got a lot of other things on your mind, but a fall herbicide application can go a long ways to reducing thistle frustration next spring when those plants are bolting and neighbors are revolting over your pretty little pink blossoms. You know where you’ve had problems in the past and those are the same places to look for problems this fall and next spring. It’ll take pretty cold weather to put musk thistle into dormancy. And if you use Tordon you can treat clear into December, assuming the ground isn’t frozen. There is still plenty of time to treat field bindweed also. It takes temperatures into the lower 20s to put bindweed to sleep for the winter. Any number of herbicide or herbicide combinations can give you excellent control of even long established bindweed in the fall.

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2001.

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