Fighting Milkweed

[Ken Macfarlane]

A few years ago milkweed made it into our area. One fellow with a lot of fields over a long distance seems to have spread it widely from chaff on his haybine.

Short of it is, we now have milkweed in some of our fields. I have been just cutting it and letting it lay however some of it manages to get to seed very quickly between cuttings and it is starting to get a good hold.

I'm going to spot spray with round up when the plant is young and growing but I understand this method is a multi year approach and isn't very effective.

I'm trying not to use any herbicide with residuals but all the ones that are really effective on milkweed are pretty nasty. We live above a recreational lake so I wouldn't want to be responsible for any leaching.

I've read plowing can actually help invigorate them by breaking the roots, if you kept the area plowed for a couple of years would that be long enough to get the upper hand?

Don't know what to do, my horse clients can't have milkweed in their hay.

 

[Michael Soldan]

We got some in our beans one year, patches here and there , neighbours too, so we got some good squirt bottles, mixed up some round up and went out early when it was cool, we did that for three mornings and covered about 80 acres, just walked to the patches and gave 'em a little squirt..cleaned up the fiels and didn't have any after ..gotta kill the root and prevent them from going to seed or you are in trouble

 

[Walt Davies]

If you are not using the land for anything important The Monarch Butterfly uses the milkweed to change from caterpillar to butterfly. We had some in the back yard when I was a kid and had great fun raising the caterpillars and watching them grow into butterfly. Its a great experience for kids even grandkids.
Walt

 

[Iowa_tire_guy]

In Kansas if we left the fields in grain sorghum too many years milk weed would become a problem. We just rotated to wheat for 2 or 3 years and took care of it. Remember rotation like to old timers used to do?

 

[Ken Macfarlane]

I guess that will be the cure. Maybe I'm imagining it, but when fields were cut early every year we didn't have near the trouble with weeds. There was two years we couldn't cut until late summer and its really given the weeds a hand.

 

[glennster]

ken, try adding a few drops of dish soap to the spray mix, it helps the roundup stick to the milkweed better.

 

[Anonymous-0]

Early mowing keeps weeds from making seeds.We have a problem weed here that is a bad pest.My friend mowed a 4 acre field early and it seemed to kill the weed off.