The description of the growth stages of annual grass weeds

Abstract

The decimal code for the growth stages of cereal crops, devised by Zadoks, Chang & Konzak (1974) and expanded by Tottman & Makepeace (1979) and Tottman (1987) was found to be generally applicable to annual graminaceous species encountered as arable weeds in the United Kingdom. For the great majority of growth stages no difficulties were found in using the Zadoks code, but agronomists, crop protection advisers and farmers identified practical problems in assessing the transition from tillering to stem elongation to node development in certain species. It is recommended that these problems could be minimised if label and advisory statements avoided the use of GS30-pseudostem (leaf sheath) erectionas a growth stage description for annual grass weeds. The benefits of being able to use one key for graminaceous crops and weeds in the United Kingdom considerably outweigh any inconvenience caused by the need to amend herbicide labels to achieve this objective.

Effects of feeding different ensiled forages on the productivity and nutrient‐use efficiency of finishing lambs

“…As a result, after careful monitoring, this treatment was discontinued and the lambs on this treatment were taken off the experiment in order to ensure animal welfare was not compromised. Table 1 lists the age or phenological stage [as described for lucerne by Kalu and Fick (1981), and as modified for red clover by Ohlsson and Wedin (1989) and for ryegrass by Lawson and Read (1992)] of each crop at harvest, together with results of the botanical separations to determine the weed contamination within the silages as offered to the lambs. The highest proportion of weeds was found in the ryegrass silage.…”

Precise knowledge of plant growth stages enhances applied and pure research

“…For example, an early description of cereal growth stages (Large, 1954) was published in the journal Plant Pathology , a description of rape growth stages (Berkenkamp, 1973) was published in the Canadian Journal of Plant Science , that of cabbages (Andaloro et al , 1983) in New York's Food and Life Sciences Bulletin , the growth stages of bird cherry (Leather, 1996) in the Journal of Ecology , those of the potato tuber (Shepherd et al , 2010) in Metabolomics . The Annals of Applied Biology has, however, over the last 40 years published a number of papers describing developmental growth stages for a range of economically important plants, for example cereals (Tottman, 1987), faba bean (Knott, 1990), potatoes (Jefferies & Lawson, 1991), linseed (Smith & Froment, 1998) and even for weeds (Lawson & Read, 1992), ornamentals such as roses (Meier et al , 2009) and trees such as willows (Saska & Kuzovkina, 2010). The Annals has also published a large number of papers describing the effects of plant growth stages on pest and disease infestations (Griffiths et al , 1975; Southwell et al , 1980; Holt et al , 1984; Lassois et al , 2010).…”