Weeding Out Hand-Weeding

Not long ago, Flowerwood Nursery in Loxley, Ala., employed 14 hand-weeders. Pesticide manager Casey Marshall often had to pull crew members off other duties to pitch in and pull weeds.

But when Flowerwood started making block treatments with SureGuard Herbicide—and implemented a two-month herbicide application cycle—it made a dramatic impact on the nursery’s productivity and, even more important, its bottom line.

“We’re down to four weeders now. This has freed our people up to do other chores around the nursery,” Marshall said. “To be able to multitask with my crew instead of hand-weeding, it’s tremendous. It’s made a big impact.” The decline in new home sales over the past year or so has put a strain on woody production, said Dr. Charles Gilliam, an Auburn University horticulture professor. “They’re hurting and they’re looking for anything they can to control costs,” Gilliam said. “Labor is a big issue.”

An unfortunate byproduct of those financial concerns, Gilliam added, is that many nurseries are purchasing cheap herbicides that don’t control their problems and have short residuals. “Some of them don’t realize that herbicides provide control of different weeds and that you have to rotate chemistries,” he said.

At Flowerwood, Marshall bought into the concept that you can get ahead and stay ahead by rotating products.

“We use SureGuard on open blocks before we put containers down and we’ve been getting 60-70 days of control on a broad spectrum of weeds,” Marshall said. “Then, every 60-70 days, we go with an overthe- top application that helps keep weeds out of the cans and off the ground.

“It’s a good cycle.”

Bittercress, eclipta and spurge are among the weeds Flowerwood has successfully controlled since adding a pre-emergence application of SureGuard to its program.

“With all the new products coming out, it’s really stepped up the process. Things are staying down longer,” Marshall said. “We tried to stretch it to two months before but we could never keep up. We had to pull guys off other chores to hand-weed. Now the whole situation has been flipped around.”