Just sprayed round up on all the garden area. Do you do this?

[Mattemma]

It will take a long time for that round up to breakdown. I would not recommend using any chemicals in soil where food will be grown.

Next time you might want to lay out some plastic and solarize the area. Another option is simply to bury the weeds with more soil and mulch.

Wishing you better health!

 

[seedcorn]

http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/glyphotech.pdf

If you want to see data from NPIC where they fed 100-1000X concentrations higher than are sprayed per acre.

Normal half life for field apps is 7 days. Once it hits the soil, it is tied up by the carbons in the soil so it is made ineffective. It's a contact herbicide.

No one recommends you drink or feed straight glysophates. It's a derivative of glysine--think soap & hand lotions.

I don't use chemical (garden is small enough, I hoe/pull weeds) but if I did this is the safest I could use.

For those using it to kill poison ivy, 2-4D is a much better killer for that weed. 1/2 life is longer and will carry over in soil. 2-4D will kill it and not harm the grasses.

 

[dave27889]

I know it is a no win situation on here about using a herbacide but I had to do what I had to do. We have to have a garden just to get by this year. Money is tight everywhere but around here it leaves as soon as it comes in. I am not crying about it we do the best we can.
I just hatched out 5 BCM chicks and I have 6 more peeping and a total of 48 eggs in this incubator. The incubator was homemade and it was made from scrap and the other incubator I have 52 eggs in and they are due to hatch on Thursday. It is a loaner from a school teacher. I have some grown hens and a couple of roosters.
I am going to try my hand at canning this year my family has done it before but not me. I always froze my stuff. I have a friend that is going to help me with doing it. He has everything we need and he has done canning for over 25 years.
If you have any good canning recipies let me know thanks. Seedcorn thanks for the info.

 

[vfem]

We have been under a burning ban for the past 2 weeks here in Eastern NC. We have had several bad fires already and we have had the crazies out also. 5 fires last week were by arson. It has been windy here and the humidity has been really low. I have had a hard time inside the house just trying to keep the humidity right in my incubators. Thank the Lord it is raining right now and I even heard thunder 5 times in the last couple of minutes ago. It has rained pretty well the last hour. I wonder if I should burn the area off if they raise the burning ban? The roundup has been on for 3 days tomorrow. Let me know if you think I should do that. My house garden hose reaches the whole garden so it should not get out of had and the area has large cleaned out ditches all around the property. The wind is suppose to drop starting Wednesday. I will look into the burning ban.
The person from Fruquay I love your area. Thought about moving there a few years ago. I bought a white Chow Chow from up there and loved that dog like it was one of my kids. She died 7 years ago and she was the sweetest dog I ever had. Not a bad thing about her. We had 1 litter of puppies off her. We mated her with another white Chow Chow and had alitter of 7 puppies all white. The bad thing in a way was everyone had their dog either spayed or nutered so we could not find one of her puppies to get another white Chow Chow. We tried to find the man we bought Roxie from but he had moved. Oh well life goes on. Thanks evryone and I will check into the burning ban.

That sounds like a beautiful dog. We had a chow chow mix once... and the best personality I've ever seen in a dog. He's about 13 years old now, and my ex still has him, but he's sweet enough to send updates since he's like family to us (my ex and the dog).

You are right about the burning ban, it may do you no good with that still in effect. Cumberland county and Harnett county had quite a few fires last week. We're sure 1-2 were on purpose... one started from a burn pile nearly 2 weeks old that still was so hot it spread! Weird!

And for your area, you may just want to ask a local to plow for you. We work with a local farm here and they offered to bring over their smaller john deere and till a 50' x 20' area we want to put a plot on. I have to go over and help them prune their orchard trees this week so I think its a fair trade Plus, I also get free pickings from the trees and fruits that don't sell (like the figs there isn't much of a market here for raw).

I bet that wouldn't cost you anymore then all your chemical purchasing would. Then you don't have to worry if it broke down in time or not. You may even be able to find someone who would be willing to help with the weeding and such if you gave them a bit of the plot for their own garden, or let them take a share of the harvest for the help over the season. I have someone paying me to use one raised bed because their garden only did so-so last year because of their lack of sunlight hours. It was a good deal.

Good luck!

 

[obsessed]

I never have sprayed in my garden but I have a smaller garden than you. I would be uncomfortable but I will also be using roundup for landscaping this year.

 

[Rozzie]

Let's be realistic here. You have some very serious health problems. You would not personally able to REALISTICALLY manage a garden alone without using Roundup, at least not this year. (The only other option would be to hire the initial cleanup done. However, you might not get spring crops in on time and you open yourself up to liability issues if someone gets injured on your property, or claims they were injured. Additionally, they might not do a good job with root cleanup of grasses, which you might be unable to deal with given your health conditions).

So, your options are

1) An application or two of Roundup before you begin this year or...

2) Buy your veggies. Given your current financial situation as a result of these surgeries, you probably could not afford organic veggies. Thus, you would be buying pesticide laden veggies. These would almost certainly have been grown using Monsanto (or other similar giants) products, including the high likelihood of Roundup or worse products...

I'd say that the initial application of Roundup is far better than having to buy all those veggies from the grocery store. Any small residual amount of chemicals that MIGHT make it into your food will be far less than what you would take in from store-bought veggies. Plus, you'll be able to get some exercise and activity while doing what gardening you can thus gaining in health benefits in another way.

Sometimes you choose the lesser evil, which is what you did.

 

[April Manier]

We have an organic farm BUT I have used pesticides.

Instead I recommend black plastic. Throw it down when you cut everything back in teh fall and weight it. In spring you can remove it and have a wonderfully weed free area. I might Water in some beer and coca cola to really get the microbial action going on before planting and then till in your amendments.

If you do year round gardening, you can keep a portion covered, rotatating it to have a ready portion to plant.

Good luck and special prayers of healing and health for your body. The exercise will be great for your heart, but don't forget to listen to your body!

 

[AmyRey]

Beer and Coca Cola? Interesting.

 

[journey11]

Instead I recommend black plastic. Throw it down when you cut everything back in teh fall and weight it. In spring you can remove it and have a wonderfully weed free area. I might Water in some beer and coca cola to really get the microbial action going on before planting and then till in your amendments.

I do this regularly on problem areas too, mostly in the summer though. I've used black plastic, but found that clear is better when the weather is still hot enough to heat up the soil beneath. You have to time it out right for solarizing to work. It does do a good job of killing off weeds and seeds at the surface and works great on quackgrass too (which sends out annoying runners underground). In the fall/winter, the black plastic would just kill the existing weeds by depriving them of sunlight (won't heat up, of course.) It's neat because you'll end up with almost a perfectly straight line at the edge where all the weeds died!

I'd say that the initial application of Roundup is far better than having to buy all those veggies from the grocery store. Any small residual amount of chemicals that MIGHT make it into your food will be far less than what you would take in from store-bought veggies. Plus, you'll be able to get some exercise and activity while doing what gardening you can thus gaining in health benefits in another way.

I agree, lesser of two evils. Your homegrown stuff is always gonna taste better too.

 

[bootstrap]

We use geotextile road fabric as a plastic ground cover to eliminate weeds. Construction companies use this and you usually can buy a piece from them if they have an open roll, it comes about 14 feet wide. Commercial greenhouses also use it as floor/ground cover. It eliminates the weeds holds in alot of water. it is a woven material so it lets water and air through. you have to cut it and burn the ends with a torch so it does not unravel. we use rocks to hold it down. We cut it into strips for the rows and burn the X holes in a staggered pattern depending on the plant. we wash it and reuse it year after year. Doesnt work for all direct seed applications but some it does.