My onions are impossable to weed.?
Question:I can keep the weeds down until they pass the green onion stage. Then the weeds take over. Any advice?
Answers:
In commercial bulb onion production, there are a couple of pre-emergent weed controls that are used; Prefar (active ingredient called bensulide) and Dacthal (active ingredient called DCPA). Both can be found in most of your hardware & garden shops.
You'll need to pull those existing weeds once more and then apply either of these herbicides onto moist (not wet) soil, followed with enough irrigation to move the herbicide into the top 1/4 inch of the soil.
There are several post-emergent herbicides for onions but I doubt if you're able to purchase them.
Let me know if you need further information on this. Hope this will at least keep further weeds from becoming established in your onions. GOOD LUCK!
-Certified Professional Crop Consultant with over 30 years of experience and a Degree in Plant Science
Give the onions a good, deep watering the night before weeding (or weed after a good rain). Any weeding is a lot easier after the ground has been saturated. The weeds pull out easily. Another tip is to do wide-row gardening. Which means instead of growing your onions in a single row, plant them in a row about 20 inches wide (or slightly wider than your rototiller, if you use one) . Plant them thick and harvest some for green onions, in the process thinning out the row. This will keep the number of weeds down because of the onions themselves choking out the weeds. Just make sure you keep thinning out the row to allow room for some of the onions to grow large.
you could weed the bed then lay down a thick mulch the mulch will not allow the seeds to germinate very well (alot of seeds need light to germinate) the mulch will also conserve moisture and as it decomposes it will add organic mater to the ground.
No garden is impossible to weed, it only takes a little time each day and a good mulching program to keep up with it. Once you let the weeds take over, the task might seem insurmountable, but it isn't.
Water the garden well, as suggested above. Start at one end and just have at it. Mulch as you go with newspapers or grass clippings. If you lay down the newspapers as you go, just lay the weeds on top of the newspapers and they become part of the solution.
Once you have the garden weeded and mulched, a few minutes a day should keep the weeds at bay.
Check out our website for more gardening ideas at-
http://www.gardening-at-the-crossroads.c...
Good Luck and Happy Gardening from Cathy and Neal!
Saturate the ground around the onions with water, pull up all the weeds you can get to, then lay strips of newspaper all around your onions, leaving only the onions exposed. then saturate thouroghly with water. The paper should act as a temporary weed guard and give your onions a chance to get started.
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