The difficult weather and soil conditions earlier this Spring have not made it easy for growers to apply pre-emergence herbicides in peas and beans, but there are effective post-em options to be considered, according to BASF.
“Due to their uncompetitive nature, peas and beans suffer heavily from weed competition during their early stages of growth,” explained John Young, BASF pulse product manager.
“Early weed removal is essential to protect yield and quality. This year growers have managed to drill their peas and beans, but have been held up applying pre-emergence herbicides, because it has been too wet or too windy. Difficult pre-em conditions could now drive many growers to look at their post-em options.”
Young explained that Basagran SG (bentazone) is a one of the few post-emergence options in beans and peas and that UK growers have this year only to use Pulsar (bentazone +MCPB) in mix with cyanazine, to good effect in peas.
“The loss of cyanazine at the end of this year will have an unfortunate knock-on effect on the popular post-em pea herbicide Pulsar as its use depends on the addition of cyanazine,” he says, “But growers are still able to use this combination on most varieties of combining and vining peas as well as forage and pigeon feed peas this year. Bearing in mind the difficulties already encountered, this is a useful fallback position.”
The mixture controls many key weeds including Black-bindweed, Charlock, Chickweed, Red dead-nettle, Fat-hen, Fumitory, Groundsel, Mayweeds, Small nettle, Orache, Redshank and Shepherd’s-purse. The mix can be used from when the crop has three fully expanded leaves until before the flower buds can be found in the terminal shoot. Best results can be expected when weeds are at the seedling stage.
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