I Love the Smell of Atrazine in the Morning.

We have burcucumber along the creek in the field by my house. Burcucumber is a nasty weed, it looks like a cucumber vine. It grows ferociously, chokes the crops, and tangles the combine. It’s particularly insidious in that you can kill it, but it will sprout again the next time it rains.

I knocked the burcucumber down early this year with Halex GT, a herbicide labeled to kill it, when the corn was about 6 inches tall. It came back again after the early June rains and I burned it off with Roundup. The corn’s almost head high now, and there’s another flush of burcucumber coming on, so this morning we pulled out the big guns.

Lana and I (and Owen and Spenser, the Wonder Dogs, ably assisted by Willis the Big Dog) put drops on our Hagie to spray underneath the corn leaves. The drops are the small black tubes hanging down vertically in front of the sprayer. We were spraying atrazine which will harm the corn when it’s this big, so the drops let you spray the weeds and not the corn.

Looking out the front window of the sprayer, it’s a sea of corn.

Looking out the left window of the sprayer. I adjust the sprayer boom height so the booms are just brushing the tops of the corn, and the drops are then spraying the ground from about 2 feet below the booms. The corn is unharmed, and the burcucumbers are dying a slow and painful death, soaked in atrazine. We add crop oil to the spray mix so, like napalm, the spray sticks the tender green flesh of the burcucumbers and causes horrible burns.

I love the smell of atrazine in the morning… it smells like victory!