THE NUTGRASS PROBLEM

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HOW TO REMOVE PATCHES OF NUTGRASS WITHOUT USING ROUNDUP OR ANY OTHER CHEMICAL.

Where do you find Potato Diggers???
See Below

How many times have you weeded your paddock only to find there is nutgrass coming up all over the place. You go an dig it out, two weeks later your sure you dug that out and here it is in the same spot !!!

These Pages are for the "Vegetable or Herb Gardener" wanting to remove Nutgrass from their farm, that have a tractor and machinery.


Driving the potato digger into
the infested section of row


Where do you find these machines?

I found mine advertised in the trading post.
All the machinery places in toowoomba stock them and in Boonah Qld


Even though the option here is to purchase machinery to remove the nutgrass, it has been the only way that I have found to successfully remove the deep nuts that penetrate the soil.

The other option here is to use roundup in the autumn-winter period to kill the grass right down to the nuts themselves. But if you are organic as we are on this farm, that is out of the question.
Nutgrass is very hard to kill while in the summer growing season as I have found on other farms I have worked on.

I began farming the riverbanks of my farm in 1995 and only observed small patches of the grass. Since then I have spread it all over my farm by the tractor wheels and scarifier.

So the crops I grew were slowly being infested with the grass that would never go away, no matter how many times I would scuffle the rows.

 Piles of nutgrass raked up
ready to lift off the paddock

A row infested with nutgrass
ready to be lifted

 In the end I had to find a way to control the problem without using chemicals. WHen soon enough the answer came. I purchased a Potato digger to lift the roots of my Echinacea purpurea crops I was growing and was amazed to see the nutgrass lifted as well and left on top of the soil with the Echinacea roots.
All I had to do was to pick up or rake up the freshly lifted grass and take them off the paddock. After using the rows for a crop now I would come in every time with the digger and lift the nutgrass and pick it up off the ground then prepare the ground as usual without having the whole patch go under green nutgrass and choke the new seedlings.

If you find another way to solve this problem please email me and we can share your thoughts on this page.

Regards

Andy Pleasance

 After a run down the row it would be handy to have a tribe to rake the nutgrass up after you.