Doug Derksen laughs a little when he thinks about the plans afoot at Agriculture Canada’s Brandon Research Centre.
The research scientist is one of the architects behind efforts to establish a weed garden at the centre.
“It’s going to look very nice,” he said, describing the reference weed garden that Agriculture Canada and the Assiniboine Community College have teamed up to build.
“It’s going to be laid out like a botanical garden.”
The reference garden will feature 50 different species of weeds, mainly those of most concern to farmers in Manitoba.
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It will offer farmers, research scientists and agriculture students a place to observe and learn about the life cycles of weeds.
It also will offer a place to learn the correct common names of weeds and how to identify them.
That can be important to farmers, because misidentifying weeds can mean applying the wrong herbicide and missing weeds of most concern.
“If you’re wasting $10 to $20 an acre, that could be your whole profit.”
For example, perennial sow thistle and two species of annual sow thistle bear a close resemblance. At one stage in their growth, it is hard to tell them apart even under a magnifying glass.
A popular means of controlling perennial sow thistle is with a pre-harvest glyphosate treatment.
However, it is not effective for controlling the type of annual sow thistle found in Manitoba, Derksen said.
Without knowing how to tell the species apart, a producer could unknowingly spray herbicide for the wrong weeds.
“If the sow thistle isn’t the perennial thistle, the pre-harvest glyphosate isn’t going to work.”
Despite the advantages of having a reference weed garden, Derksen laughs at the irony of having a well-tended plot of weeds on display at the research centre.
He laughs more while discussing the difficulties of growing weeds.
“Weeds are funny,” he said. “When you want them to grow, they usually don’t.”
Derksen said some weeds need special coaxing to make them germinate as they would in typical farm conditions – sanding the seed surface, peeling the skin off the seed, or even treating the seed with chemicals to break down the dormancy.
“It’s just a pain in the butt when you want them to do their thing on demand.”
