Natural Sequence Farming

[Jason Warde]

I have read back from the brink and found this to be most interesting. I understand the concept of slashing and that Caltrop is good for the soil, however wherever we walk we have clatrop stuck to our boots. With 3 young children, this is not pleasant. Our farm is situated near Echuca and consists of 15 acres of undulalating sand hills. We have been told water will eliminate caltrop, however we are dry farming.The caltrop has been overpowering the entire sand hill which appears to have some correlation with the summer rains we have been getting.

In winter we have lots of winter grass and weeds. We do not have anything much to slash due to the kangaroo population.DO you have any suggestions on how to get rid of our clatrop problem? and do you know of what we could plant eg grass that will survive through the summer months to provide us with a ground cover? Is couch an option as we have patches of this throughout the property? Do cattle eat couch?

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
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Jason Warde

[Ian James]

Caltrop is not a friendly plant.

In fact it is incredible in the way that it is able to grow and flourish at such an amazing growth rate including being unpalatable to stock and even toxic to those animals sufficiently starving to try eating it.

After summer rain thousands of caltrop seedlings appear anywhere there has been a plant the previous summer, they are disarmingly small but within a week will be the size of a saucer.

Without competition each plant can easily double it's size each week, growing laterally across the ground. Within a few weeks a single plant can grow to two meters across.

By this time the plants will be covered in clusters of extremely sharp and long pointy burrs which, as they dry fragment into smaller sections, each containing a seed and sharp thorn.

I do not know of any bio method suitable to control these plants, depending on the size of the effected area, chemical control is easily possible, especially when the plants are small and fresh from the germinating rains by using ester 680 at 200 ml/Ha with 40 L water/ha.

[duane]

There is a blog already running on this caltrop question at http://www.naturalsequencefarming.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=431&highlight=caltrop

You may wish to add your post there.

[Jason Warde]

thanks for the advice
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Jason Warde