by Bryan Brown, Marcus Lopez, and Abby Seaman
What’s the best way to manage weeds in organic winter squash? Many farmers use black plastic mulch. Others cultivate. And small-scale farms may spread straw mulch by hand. There’s also interest in using roller-crimped rye as a mulch.
All of these different approaches will not only affect weeds but also have very different impacts on other pests, and on soils too. So we’re going to compare them side-by-side, and repeat each system four times so that we’re sure about our results.
Each plot will be scouted for diseases and insect pests and half will be sprayed with OMRI-approved products if over threshold. The other half will not be sprayed. It’ll be very interesting to see how this plays out over the season. Of course, the results will be dependent on the weather, so we’ll be repeating the experiment next year too.
We want each system, or treatment, to be as realistic as possible so we’ve gotten feedback from squash farmers, educators, and consultants to come up with the following weed management treatments (and we’re still deciding about whether one hoeing or handweeding event would be realistic in each treatment, so email bryan.brown@cornell.edu what you think):
- Direct seeded squash cultivated with sweeps+fingers 3 times, then just sweeps at layby.
- Transplanted squash into black plastic with drip irrigation. One between-plastic cultivation.
- Transplanted squash into bare soil, which will be mulched with straw once the squash are at least 6” tall.
- Transplanted squash into roller-crimped winter rye that had been zone-tilled with a single shank in March to alleviate compaction.
Single end-of-the-season reports on yield often miss much of the nuance and lessons learned during the growing season. So, the purpose of this blog is to allow us to record our observations while they’re fresh and hopefully this will allow you to learn from our successes and failures as we go.
Marcus is our awesome technician doing most of the work on this project and will write most of the subsequent posts.