Weed control tactics Nov 9

Speaker1: For California AG today, I'm Mike Stephens. We conclude 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 weed affecting plants and wine grapes to name a couple. He explains different techniques on eliminating weeds from the vineyards.

Mechanical control. You know, the timing is very important, and there's a whole bunch of different reasons about why you can and can't do cultivation. Perennial weeds rose and all these other things. There's just some places where you don't want to use the cultivator, especially in Napa handholding. Now, when people ask me how to control weeds, I yeah, this is my best recommendation. Nothing ever kills weeds. I can't hoe it. They laugh at me and say, OK, John, what are we really going to do? This isn't going to happen much. It's like you tell people, I spent some time and screaming Eagle Vineyard in Napa. Those of you who might have a bottle or two at seven hundred and fifty dollars a bottle, just so you know they hold around everyone. So I've told my growers, apparently, if you hold on every vine, you can get a lot more money for your grapes, fake on me. It doesn't work that way. So I tell the growers all the time when we talk about all the situations we've had, all with Roundup and this and that every weed can be controlled by hand. It's just a matter of time and money that no matter what, you might have to have a chainsaw in that hand. But every week can be controlled by a human flabby. You know, all we're trying to do as much fun as it is to burn weeds to the ground. We're just trying to boil the water in the leaves, break the cell wall so that they die of desiccation.