Weed Control Under Vines Nov 8

For California AG today, I'm Mike Stephens. We continue with John Roncoroni Weed Science Farm Advisor, Emeritus, UC Cooperative Extension Napa Valley, specializing in weed control and cover crops. Also, some of his areas of expertise are an IPM weed affecting plants and wine grapes, to name a few. He continues with weed control and the types of weed control under grapevine.

I'm getting a lot of questions lately about under vine weed control. Now the funny thing is, and I know there's a few people of my age who have been doing this as long as I have all these new techniques that we're coming up with that were kind of stalled. Well, it kind of has not only research, but mostly acceptance. You saw Scott Stein monsters talk yesterday was the graduate student at Davis. When we did this work in Sonoma in the early nineties, but when glyphosate was one hundred and fifty dollars a gallon, we did lots of work. So this is coming back now, but most of the work I've been doing with the Zalewski. But the thing is is they have to buy a mower. I did a presentation in Sonoma and one of the growers said, John, how about getting a mower? That mower is fantastic are a hundred and twenty five people in the audience who said, How many the rest of you have mowers? She raised her hands. She was the only one. So we got to look at some new equipment. We can't just use that old sprayer in the back 50 50 with an old oak nozzle on it. It's competitive when it's growing, and it's also competitive when it dies. The thing is, it's holding great leaves, but if you've gone and you're not going to be spraying, it doesn't matter if your grape leaves are there or not.