Silverleaf nightshade key messages & advice - Part 3
The Silverleaf Nightshade Team have spoken to hundreds of farmers and advisors thoughtout the past two years collating their tips and tricks learnt from tackling with this persistent weed.
Here are this week's tips and tricks:
1. Don’t underestimate the effect of seedling spread: seed will germinate if the soil moisture is good for more than 5 days. Seeds are time bombs.
2. Small green berries still contain viable seeds – be warned!
Participatory research is a key component of this program to generate a large and diverse baseline data on farming scenarios, weed pressure and failure across large geographical zones. This data will be used to refine current silverleaf nightshade best management practices, tailoring the need of different farming enterprises in broader geographic regions across multiple states.
Beginning next week, we will post individual case studies containing key messages and information on how each farmer successfully manages silverleaf nightshade specific to their production system. Stay tuned!
Congratulations to Dr Hanwen Wu, Rex Stanton and Diedre Lemerle on their informative Silverleaf Nightshade article, just published in this months edition of Crop Protection (2016), pp. 58-64.
The paper describes results to field experiments conducted at two locations in south-eastern Australia between 2006 and 2008 to examine a range of herbicides for control of S. elaeagnifolium on seed production and root regrowth.
Their research findings have formed the basis of many of the key messages currently promoted to farmers in Australia, such as :
