We were fortunate to get between 23-32mm of rain last week. You couldn’t script better timing for this rain – with seeding just finished on Sunday – and rain falling Wednesday night. This will help to get any of the seeds that may have been stranded in a dry layer germinated and growing. This will also help to get all the weeds growing.
Today we started spraying the first pass in our Invigor canola. The earliest planted canola is at 3 leaf stage. We will be waiting on our cereals for a little while yet. There are very few weeds growing – we use a herbicide at preseed burnoff that has a residual for up to 21 days for broadleaf weeds. This allows us to wait until the cereal crop is at a later stage and allow for all of the grassy weeds to germinate prior to spraying.
This next week looks to be a warm week with highs in the upper 20’s and later in the week a chance for more rain. Our soil moisture profile is satisfactory at this stage – although the plants do not require much at this early stage. It is later in June and through the months of July and early August that will be the most important.