Eastern VA. No such thing as too many Magnums. | The best way in the old days was Dual Magnum and Bladex. They quit making Bladex a few years ago, but your chemical dealer could have some leftover. Now we just use full rate of dual and a half rate of atrazine. We would use a full rate of atrazine, except we have a plant-back issue with vegetables planted in July just after we harvest the sweet corn. But the Dual-Atrazine gave a super clean field for us. However we've been using Command and Curbit (Sonalan) on those same fields in the non-sweet corn years, that might be helping. Callisto alone sucks, so don't try that. (I shoulda spiked it with some Atrazine) We didn't cultivate this year at all except the 20 acre test plot where the Callisto was. The purslane was thick as carpet so we had to run some sweeps through it. If there's a better herbicide program, with no vegetable plant back issues for broccoli and squash, I'd also like to know about it. As far as RR, I haven't seen any for sweet corn. If it was available, I doubt I'd buy it anyway. I wish they never came out with RR field corn. There's RR field corn, cotton and soybeans and no way to control the volunteers from any of them, unless you use old chemistry, so why not just use it to start with. Not to mention the RR mare's tail and RR pigweed. There are so many other good chemicals that make it easy to control weeds in corn anyway. Receivers wouldn't want RR sweet corn even if it was available. There is Bt trait sweet corn for worms, but its not 100% control (Corn Ear Worms), so we have to spray some anyway. It's almost 75% more per bag, That can mean $250 EXTRA PER BAG of 100m. Thats over $60/acre. So I figure I can do a lot of spraying for that. We only plant Bt on sweet corn harvested AFTER Aug 1 down here. Otherwise it's not worth in our territory. I doubt its worth it all all much north of here. Most commercial receivers don't want Bt. I know some growers in Fla and Ga that plant Bt and still have 15 sprays to control the worms. It depends where you are.
Edited by Virginia Veg. 1/2/2007 16:49
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Keeping Sweet Corn Clean
