Yeah it would be nice not to disturb the soil anymore than necessary.
I’ve tried boiling water… It worked, but getting it where you need it is a little more difficult, and time consuming, and it’s possible to kill the good plants too… I wonder if there’s a way to heat and deliver it in small quantities so it doesn’t kill what we want to keep? Perhaps microwave and syringe to put it where it will do the most damage?
We’ve been discussing restoring the mycelium in these gardens… Not killing that could be important too!
With 24 hour (or even hourly?) survalience you could potentially.catch the weed at a smaller size and use less energy and resources to distroy the offending thing!
The reality is to catch it smaller the camera has to be able to see. Most young plants don’t grow impressively fast. So the size difference between 23.9 hours old and 59 min old is not much. So you waste a lot more energy searching for weeds than the extra power to kill 23 hour older weed vs a 1 hour old. Even a 43 hour older weed is not normally going to be big enough to use more power to kill than a 1 old weed.
There is a point of demising returns on power usage at particular points it will cost the same amount of power to kill the weed and for those time when it costs the same amount of power either way its not worth wasting power attempting to find it sooner. Something else that is evil is in fact killing the weed too soon also has it down sides when you are just ploughing the weed in. When the plant is really small it can have consumed more carbon and the like out the soil and released to the atmosphere than it puts back by being crushed back in. This is a case were more does not always equal better. Yes more than every 14 days is for sure. Between 1 to 7 days based on weather conditions. Less light/heat slower all plants can grow. Weed has to grow enough to be detectable and to take fatal harm.
Yes the issue with hot water and killing weeds is getting it exactly where you want it. Most ground based mycelium needs at least 60C for 1 hour to kill them out right. Some natural mixes of myscelium will live though 120C for 12 hours so depending on the mycelium mix in your soil you might be able to go quite extreme only harming plants.
My point of view is machines job is to what we find hard or time consuming or both. Deploying hot water safely and quickly is something we find both hard and time consuming. Microwave need proper shielding.
http://www.ucanr.org/sites/Solarization/files/112761.pdf Funny enough percentage of seeds of most plants will be killed under that and roots are way weaker. Main reason to have to get to boiling is to get depth and even that you have used boiling water the soil does not stay hot long enough to massive harm the mycelium. Yes hot water will kill some of the mycelium but will leave enough intact to repopulate. Yes wanting to use hot water in small controlled areas is to reduce the over all damage its not like covering the complete bed in hot water is going to do any long term damage to the mycelium levels. Yes some short term reduction but you will do more damage digging a hole or digging the bed over.
The Hmmm a tiny microwave(1/2 cup) that runs for 4 minutes(or whatever), boils the water and squirts it on the weed immediately! thats a great idea! The water is already there…that’s 1/2 the problem!
It could be done during the watering cycle! Save resources!
Correct me if I’m wrong, … the weed identifying part of the video showed a high level flyover, and took just about a minute to I’d the whole bed? Was that sped up, or perhaps it was staged to shorten the video?
If it is that quickly done then you could do it whenever your liked not a lot of resources wasted!
I had, the weed I was thinking of is a climbing vine, Bindweed (Convolvulus). Boiling water is the best control but is impracticable as you need to do a large area around the plant.
This is silly but you are planting on a grid, could be repeatably planted on the same spot. So why have a large bed of unused soil ? No soil, no weeds. Going a step further why soil and not hydroponics. One could go further and have a growing conveyor belt, if you have a gutter/trough of water/feed add the seed one end and the plant slowly moves down the line growing until it gets time to harvest, pull it out. But then there goes the concept of a 3 axis machine. Seeder one end, slow conveyor, and harvester the other. Several troughs parallel.
Silly idea.
That is the thing Boiling water is the best control for lots and lots of pest plants. The biggest issue is delivery.
Bindweed is one of the plants were just surface bash it all you like you are not killing it as every fragment of it roots is basically a seed and for it not to grow back you need it down at least 4 inches by bash/dig in. Even so if it a case of a bindweed seed and you get on to it reasonably quickly hot water area is still quite small because its root area is still quite small.
Bindweed has some funny weakness. cannot survive on waterlogged soils. So drowning it in any temp water works.
is not tolerant of shade Covering it is another attack against it.
Of course both hot/cold water and shade against bindweed to be practical requires getting to it early. Now if you just used the bash attack and have not worked out it not dieing fairly quickly you are in trouble.
Growing plants in the same spot is not a super big problem as long as you are doing crop rotation correctly. Hydroponics works out very expensive because it basically use fertiliser over and over again. Lot of people look into aquaponics and the like. I am sorry to say aquaponics gravel beds suffer from lots of the same weed problems as using soil. So no soil does not equal no weeds unless you go complete Aeroponics in doors that have nothing like soil. Any form of soil substitute is a place that a unwanted seed can get to and grow.
The slow conveyor solution has been tried enough times. Sorry to say it basically does not anywhere near as effective/dependable as trays. Main issue with all slow conveyor systems have been breakages think mass of plants you end up moving all the time. Heavier the mass you are moving the more wear you put on things resulting in more breakages so you attempt to plan to keep plants as still as possible. Flood and drain systems that you use with trays and the like you are able to reduce the only mechanical parts are pumps. Key word people miss is pumps you don’t fit one pump you fit 2 and if one dies the other keeps your plants alive. Its very hard to fit redundancy in a conveyor belt system.
The more mechanical part you put on your watering system something-ponic or garden the more likely a parts will fail. In built garden beds I go wicking bed designs and in something-ponic it is Flood and drain using some form of mechanical triggering syphoning process. Nothing is a more effective crop plant killer than absolutely no water problem with a crop we cannot use that against weeds because you cannot selectively do no water. It is one of the big issues I have with the foodbot what are you going to do if you have a crop in and your motors/machine die and you are still too busy to properly take care of the bed? Are the plants going to die due to lack of care? Wicking garden bed designed right as long as you can water it once every 1 to 2 weeks(depending on size of reserve and temperatures) the crop will remain watered.
Yes controlling weeds is one problem protecting crop from mechanical fails is another. Mechanical fails can make most weeds look like nothing problem.
Opps I hit reply at wrong point.
Morning glory is a relative to Bindweed.
Morning glory is from Ipomoea group of plants
Bindweed is from Convolvulus group of plants.
Those groups are basically cousins to each other with a common ancestor some books call ipomoea a sub group of Convolvulus. So lots and lots of the same level of nightmare to deal with.
Of course Ipomoea batatas what is sweet potato is a well behaved version and when it flowers(what it does not like doing) it has exactly the same flower as Morning glory. The distance from good crop plant to weed is not much and this is why toxins and methods to kill weeds do in crop plants so well.
There is only about 18 different plants from the Convolvulus group with the title bindweed.
I can remember one of the native north American species, There is a native south American species as well. Even here in Australia we have a native species of bindweed.
Fairly much there is a bindweed that is native everywhere that conditions support it. It is on every single continent as a native. Then you have introduced versions of it as well just to make things more of a mess.
Convolvulus don’t like really wet or lack of sunlight. So you have possible problem with bindweed where ever you have mid range conditions for crops.
So bindweed group of weed have the same issues attempt to get rid of. So this fairly much a global pest type farmbot will be facing off against.
Due to similar flowers and leaves between Morning glory(the Ipomoea group) and the some of the Convolvulus bindweeds its nothing uncommon for people to be miss identifying some types of bindweed as morning glory or vice verse. Lluckly the require the same treatment to kill them.
Out of the 18 species of bindweed some are better behaved than others. Some are shrubs not vines. But if you have any one of the 18 versions bindweeds attempting to grow in your garden it is not going down to light bashing.
Due to it being so common globally and how tough convolvulus group of plants is makes convolvulus group a good benchmark weed. Basically if you cannot deal with convolvulus you have a possible problem.
Should have put there out of the 18 named species of bindweed. There are more due to owning to the class by species. Like over 200 odd that can be called bindweed due to owning to species that are without question is bindweed.
It gets worse. It why plant identification so hard. I just noticed I included a mistake.
Calystegia what is a sub species of Convolvulus are what are officially called false bindweeds but people using common names will incorrectly call them bindweed or morning glory what they are not because they are the wrong species.
If you have something in front of you and you suspect it morning glory, bindweed… and you are not sure you call it “Convolvulaceae” family plant. That is the family that covers all morning glory, bindweeds, false bindweeds and so on its a cheats way to be right. Everything Convolvulaceae is tough.
Palomineo so fairly much what you call morning glory could be a morning glory or bindweed or a false bindweeds or one of the other sub types under the “Convolvulaceae” family.
Ok thanks!
I’ve never heard the name bindweed before. Sounds like maybe it’s a slang name, and I’m in the wrong part of North America to hear that name.
This part is still in development from my understanding. The fly over in the video was a computer generated image of the process. The computer uses planted location to identify where green should be and then anything outside a defined circle of the plated area is classified as a weed. As the plants grow the circle around the plant area is increased. With the present Camera it would not be possible to locate weeds in the flyover manner.
Methods used to find marijuana plants in forestry might apply here. Law enforcement here is not in fact looking for the plant as such but the light freq the plants leaves reflect. Yes one of the methods for finding the illegal crops with satellite images. Reason why more and more illegal marijuana is going in doors.
With the present Camera it would not be possible to locate weeds in the flyover manner.
This is maybe or maybe not with current camera location. Filtering out the soil and the planted crop reflected light. If you have anything else you could be looking at a weed or a pest insect but this would need filters as well. It very much the same way some people have used light filters to see though clothing. Some crops will be more see able though than others. Of course being able to see a weed under the crop plant does not mean the machine can do anything about it.
There are small ones out there. One is even runs on dc volts. There is also a new water heating unit for domestic hot water. Too big though
One thing microwaveing to heat water can do is overheat the water. Over the boiling point…212 degrees ! If undisturbed, the water doesn’t boil, but if disturbed it can sorta explode into a boil, shooting hot water everywhere. (Like for instance if you touch the cup to get it outa the microwave)
If it were microwaved in a sealed metal pressure container, just a bit too much then a valve were opened in the bottom, the water would be forced out onto the weed! Perhaps a little air space could be left in the container to allow pressurization to push out the hot water out too!. No pump easy and light unit it could work quite well, and economical too!