secondary tillage: tools and concepts

Andy, sounds like you are finding our first-hand how tough it is to control quack grass with tillage. Quack grass reproduces both by seed and underground rhizomes that are very aggressive and extensive. So they have extensive root reserves to re-grow after you disk them down. As you are finding out, if the top growth is not buried it will regrow. But that is not the tough part. New plant emerge from the roots. And even if you cut up the roots, plants can emerge from the cut pieces of root. So with tillage the technique is to till it, and then when it begins to regrow, till it again until it exhausts the root reserves. And you will have the weed seed bank to deal with for a long time. This time of year tillage is tough because there is adequate moisture to keep the plant going, and it is cool and moist enough that the exposed plant pieces do not dessicate. Field scale tillage control is probably more successful in summer.

From what you describe, it may be best to moldboard plow and then disk and harrow as necessary to keep the weeds knocked back. The other option is chemical weed control to get back to a manageable situation and start from there. Good luck.

quack grass is a nasty one and around here we have what we call canada thistle, a thistle that runs with rhizomes, a real bugger.
I have heard of farmers with nasty problems using a summer fallow and using more of a cultivator type approach, because you don’t want to cut the roots up but rather dessicate them out. The williams tool system, from market farm, might be a good start. I have used it with tractor cultivation of row crops it does a bang up job. Exactly what you’re talking about, sweeps that undercut and then follow by wire fingers that scratch and up root the plants. When properly used it flips the plant roots up in the air to dry out and die. I can even picture a just the fingers to scratch and flip the grass out. And honestly the moldboard doesn’t get all the quack grass either. We always live with some of it. Here is the link to market farm:
http://www.marketfarm.com/cfms/williams_tool_system.cfm

I agree with the above – it’s a tough one to get a handle on. It loves open ground, however it doesn’t like competition. i.e. fast growing overshadowing plants like heavy winter rye crop in autumn or buckwheat sown heavily in the warmer months. Or for smaller areas, cover with cardboard or what ever will NOT let it get it’s green shoots up into the sunlight. We have almost eliminated it from our market garden using smother crops. Pigs also do a job on it though it may take some specific management of them to get them to really clean it up. Jay

andy, there is an old hd tool out there called a weeder. not sure how easy it would be to find one. it resembles a dump rake only with many more points. so many that psi is minimum, and it walks on the surface of your seed bed upsetting new emerging weeds and drying and killing the root. used after you prepare the seed bed and depending on how soon you plant, a few times until the plants reach a few inches in height. i have one modified for three point hitch and use it but even still, sooner or later, if you aren’t going to poison, then you have to get down and handweed. bindweed is our biggest nuisance. chop it five times and get five new weeds.

There is no magic bullet to control quackgrass without chemicals. I have had good luck with a combination of summer fallow and buckwheat plowdown planted at about one bushel to the acre, but it takes a few years of the right rotation to beat it back. The disc chops up the connecting roots between plants, allowing each root piece to start a new plant. A springtooth drag, on the other hand, should be able to flip the roots out of the ground so they dry out if conditions are right. Years ago I had a weeder like Mitch described. It worked best when used on annual weeds just after they germinate and have only a couple leaves, great for weed control in corn before the corn even emerges. But it won’t do much against quackgrass. Bob

We’ve been working up a half acre field that was in no-till human powered vegetables for a few years.
The field doesn’t have the best drainage, and the compacted permanent paths were completely infested with quack

After after fall plowing, we’ve taken advantage of the dry spring and have disced the field 3 times already, plus 1 pass through with a riding cultivator set up for field cultivation as best we could (Our springtooth was hit by an idiot with a truck last year.)

The disc harrow has been working, though only slowly, as the grass hasn’t had a chance to regrow much.I liked the action of our S-tine sweeps on the cultivator, but we didn’t like the way we had the cultivator set up.
I think we need at least another 2 months of fallow to kill it. Then we’ll plant buckwheat, or another fast-growing cover crop, just for good measure. I really hope that this is a 1-time affair, as 14 weeks of fallow and intensive cultivation doesn’t fit too well with the ideas that I have about soil health.

As I understand it (not that well), quackgrass should be disced during spring fallow, so as to fragment and destroy its food reserves, while it should be desiccated during summer fallow. If it is disced in the summer, it is more likely to multiply.

And my feeling is that zero tolerance is probably the best policy.

Ben Dube
Cerridewn Farm
Green Mountain College