A weekly report prepared by the staff of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA). If you require further information, regarding this report, call the Elora Resource Centre at 519-846-0941. Office hours: 8:30am to 4:30pm. For technical information, call the Agricultural Information Contact Centre at 1-877-424-1300 or visit the OMAFRA website: www.ontario.ca/omafra.
CORN SCHOOL: A THREE-POINT POST-PLANTING SCOUTING CHECKLIST
Hot, humid weather across much of corn-growing areas of Ontario has the crop adding a leaf stage about every four days.
As corn pops into that four-leaf to five-leaf stage, it’s time to get some dust on the roots and check three key aspects of early crop establishment: plant health, weed escapes, and planter performance.
Your guide for this step-by-step corn school- https://www.realagriculture.com/corn-school/ – post-planting checklist is Steph Kowalski, agronomy lead for the Agromart Group. She joins RealAgriculture’s Bern Tobin in the field to check in on inter-veinal striping and determining nutrient deficiency, documenting weed escapes, and lining up doubles, skips, or late emerging plants to the planter row.
Summary
Get down and look for any symptoms or odd growth on plants themselves. During very rapid growth, striping can be alarming and easily confused for a deficiency.
Do you see any weed patches?
Kowalski says that some tough-to-kill weeds like horsetail, nutsedge and annual bluegrass are a growing issue.
Document any patches, as resistant weeds are also building in number and area, and put a long-term plan together for these misses.
If you see gaps or skips in a row, get digging. A missing plant could be environmental- or pest-related or it could be a planter issue.
Noticing a trend in skips, doubles or gaps? Use wheel tracks to observe whether or not the issue shows up consistently in a field before you head back to the shed to do a once-over on the planter.
Written by RealAgriculture agronomy team – https://www.realagriculture.com
DAME’S ROCKET AND BUTTERCUP
I have been getting calls about the beautiful purple flowers that are showing up along roadsides and fence bottoms.
They are not purple loosestrife. They are dame’s-rocket, a member of the mustard family. It could be confused with “flox” which has five petal flowers, but Dame’s-rocket has four petals.
It came from Europe as an ornamental, but, has escaped from the farmsteads and is proliferating in undisturbed areas at a surprising rate. It flowers from May to August.
When the flower opens it is almost purple and slowly fades to mauve to pink to white.
The seedpods are typical of the mustard family. It is a perennial and spreads by seeds, forming large patches in a few years. It grows from three to four feet tall with hairy stems and lance shaped leaves.
If a weed is a plant where you don’t want it, then you decide whether it is a weed or a flower. It is not on the noxious weed list.
Another weed I see around quite a lot now is buttercup. I am assuming everyone knows buttercup but do you know it is listed with the plants poisonous to livestock?
I quote, “Buttercups have a bitter acrid juice, which causes severe pain and inflammation and may be poisonous when grazed by livestock.”
Normally livestock avoids grazing buttercup but may be tempted if proper feed is scarce.
There are several members of the buttercup family, but, the two most common are “tall buttercup” and “creeping buttercup” both of which are a menace to livestock.
Written by John C. Benham, weed inspector
