 Hi, I'm Jeremy Pickens the nursery and greenhouse specialist with Alabama Extension and I'm going to present a study or trial that I did with Dr. Chris Marvel at University of Florida on post-emergent weed control in az egg jasmine and dwarf Mondo grass ground covers. So you know ground covers are a popular alternative to turf. You can use them on places or in places where mowers are not accessible like steep slopes or in deep shade where grass or turf doesn't grow well. Over time it can reduce your mulching cost. There's not a lot of pest pressure for most of these ground covers. However early on in establishment weeds can become a problem. So some of the species that are commonly used in Alabama would be aziatic jasmine, Mondo or dwarf Mondo grass, English ivy, cast irons, and junipers. Those are all pretty common but we are just going to be discussing the aziatic jasmine and dwarf Mondo today. There are some success strategies to keep the weeds out or reduce weed pressure and that would be to use fast growing species if possible or increase your plant density so the more plants you have per area the faster it's going to fill in and just keep in mind that the less amount of sunlight that is hitting the soil is going to equal less weeds germinating. So mulch can be used. It's a little difficult sometimes to get mulch in and around some of these small plants so you know chopped pine straw or maybe a little bit finer grade mulch sometimes may help with that. There's also some plenty of pre-emergent herbicides and I'll show you a list of these labeled for both of these species aziatic jasmine and dwarf Mondo. You definitely if you have the ability to to hand weed often you know just going in and rogan through that ground cover as often as possible is going to really reduce the weed pressure by keeping that seed bank low and then when you need it there's also the option for chemical post emergent control and that's kind of what we're going to be talking about today. So here is a list of some of the pre-emergent herbicides labeled for aziatic jasmine. Plenty of granular and spray applied products and you know you can always hit pause and write these down. There's also a post emergent herbicides and we're going to talk about some of these that we evaluated as far as plant safety goes. Also monographs plenty of options for pre-emergent products and post emergent products. So the purpose of this trial was to evaluate 10 commonly used post emergent herbicides for over the top of aziatic jasmine dwarf Mondo. We are just evaluating how this affects plant growth or plant safety you know did it hurt our our ground covers really what we're after and so this project was led by Chris Marble at the University of Florida and he conducted his trial at the station in Apopka looking at aziatic jasmine and perennial peanut. We're just going to be discussing aziatic jasmine today because we don't grow a lot of perennial peanut in Alabama and then at the ornamental horticulture research station we did dwarf monographs. So we repeated these study each trial twice and you know we used 2x the label rate at 30 gallons per acre so that's two times the I think the highest label rate and so this was kind of like a worst-case scenario so if you went out and kind of messed up on your calibrating and put too much out would these be safe and so also we did two applications one of course at initiation and then another one at eight weeks after initial treatment so all in all these plants were evaluated about 14 to 16 weeks and again that was two applications in that time period. So I'll just go through each of the active ingredients that we tested so benzozine we use the product of basacran turf and ornamental it really targets nut sedge what's nice about this product is it kills the tuber so it does several of net sedge it does several sedges and several large excuse me broadleaf weeds it is not labeled for asiac jasmine and it's not labeled for dwarf mondo and the amount of injury we saw I would not recommend using it again it's not labeled for either of these crops it did significantly injure both crops and reduce growth by 51 or 29 percent. Cloperalid the product we use was Lawn Trail it's used on several large broadleaf weeds especially thistles and it does suppress dollar weed there is an over-the-top application on several junipers and other ornamental plants asiac jasmine however is not labeled we did see significant injury with 30 percent reduction in growth dwarf mondo is also not labeled we did not see any injury after two applications the 2x rate we did see a reduction in growth by about 24 percent when we compared that to the control so this might be a product that could potentially be used although not labeled in a situation where you already had an existing stand of dwarf mondo and you had to control some weeds that might be on the species I mean excuse me on the label and you weren't really worried about a reduction in growth. So philazofop the product we use was fusilade this is a gramaticide so that is grass specific it will only kill grass it does control an assortment of grass you can consult the label for that some of the ones that might be interesting to you would be Bermuda grass crab grass or torpedo grass does an excellent job on all those Asiatic jasmine it is labeled for over top as well as dwarf mondo grass we didn't have any problems with this active ingredient being applied no reduction growth and no damage. Glyphosinate or glyphosate you know these are both broad spectrum systemic herbicides of course these are used to just basically wipe out whatever they are sprayed on and of course both of these crops are not labeled we did see significant injury with Asiatic jasmine and significant growth reduction both about 50% however dwarf mondo grass it totally wiped it out a nearly 100% mortality so if you want to kill dwarf mondo grass both these products worked really well of course we use the 2x rate. Hello Sulfuron the product we tested was sedge hammer it controls both yellow and purple nut sedge and several broadleaf weeds Asiatic jasmine and dwarf mondo are not labeled we did see significant injury after the second application on Asiatic jasmine and we did see a 26% reduction in growth excuse me there was no injury after two applications and so this is again a potential resource for established plantings if you're not worried about growth however it did it is not labeled for that use dwarf mondo grass again not labeled we did see minor injury after one application but that's but it was not acceptable it did reduce growth by 55% so I would stay away from mondo grass with this active ingredient halosulfuron. In maziquin the product we use was scepter turf and ornamental it is a product that controls sedges does control dollar weed while garlic hen bit it is labeled for both Asiatic jasmine and dwarf mondo grass we only saw minor injury and no growth reduction in Asiatic jasmine only minor injury with dwarf mondo in some cases moderate injury and it did reduce growth by 47% but again this is at a 2x rate and two applications within six to eight weeks of each other Scythoxidum another gramaticide does a good job on plenty of perennial and annual grasses it will control Bahaya Bermuda and crabgrass both Asiatic jasmine and mondo grass are labeled and we didn't see any problems using this product for the active ingredient sulfentrazon we use dismiss it controls both yellow and purple nut sedge with 24 to 48 hours control does do several broadleaf weeds including dollar weed Asiatic jasmine is not labeled we did see minor injury but it recovered did not see any growth reduction that's if the 2x rate dwarf mondo grass we saw severe injury and it reduced growth by 61% sulfosulfuron or sarkendia is a product we use it does also control yellow and purple nut sedge it does control chamber bitter dollar weed and several other large grass grass and sedges broadleaf weeds also Asiatic jasmine is labeled for over-the-top we saw unacceptable injury it reduced growth by 36% it's labeled for over-the-top use but again we were using the 2x rate so it may have different results if you were using the normal labeled rate dwarf mondo grass minor injury for first application under unacceptable injury for the second application and reduced our growth by 48% if you wanted to take a look at the data and a nice summary of this work you can find it free online at the journal environmental horticulture that's through the horticulture research institute's website under the title tolerance of three deep south non-turf ornamental ground covers to applications of post-emergent herbicides if you're looking for efficacy data on certain products related to nursery and landscape crops please take a look at the southeastern US pest control guide for nursery crops NC state hosted on their website there's a free PDF if you want to buy a hard copy you can purchase that through their website and also you can do that through Amazon it's a great resource and I would encourage you to get a copy if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at Jeremy dot Pickens at Auburn dot EU and you can always reach me at the station at 251 342 2366