Top tips for mung growing
Grow your crop with finesse
.AS JANUARY moves on and narrow storm systems give us hopes and some grief, the attached photo, if from your country would be a nice way to usher in 2018.
Some of our number do have portions of nice looking mung bean crop and many others do not unfortunately.
However as we all know it is not over yet for a potential summer plant of our short and quick mung bean crops.
A few reiterated comments now from me will not help the rain fronts develop on your doorstep, but will make growing mungs easier and hopefully more successful.
You really need an even strike as the weeks tick by.
Day degrees is what makes their growing time and uneven strike with the later planting times can get nightmarish for decision making in the reproductive and desiccation stages.
So issues like planting depth and using AMA quality seed are a good start.
Successful inoculation is extremely important, especially as inoculants can be rendered useless in hot and sunny conditions on trucks or big seed bins.
This includes planting into hot dry soil structures.
You need about 70kg of nitrogen to grow a tonne per hectare of mung beans.
Note my words here to grow the mung bean crop. This is not meaning N removal figure in the seed crop, which is much lower than this.
Nutrition in the impending root zone is a key issue, whilst not undermining your seed bed tilth, for the need of good seed to soil contact.
There just is not a lot of
time to correct any nutritional problems usually, with a fast-growing mung bean crop.
Row spacing always comes up for a mention and being old school, it made perfect sense to push row widths wider to a metre in the 1990s, to gain plant height for ease of harvesting.
With great varieties generated these days by Col Douglas and the breeding team at Hermitage, we have varieties that can produce plant height and potential extra yield in narrower rows as has been proven in the last
few years.
Checking these well-grown crops in narrow rows with a beat sheet for insects later on does have problems, however the possible extra yields are worth the challenge.
We should be all over weed control, as many of us have had plenty of practice with the few options available.
I do want to state very strongly again to NOT spray flowering pulse crops with a Group A herbicide for grass control.
In other words do not apply Haloxyfop or Clethodim or
Sethoxydim type products on even budding mung bean crops.
Buds produce flowers very quickly and it is too late then to spray your grass weeds for our mostly exported mung bean crop.
It nearly lines up, that if you are checking mirids, it is too late to spray grass herbicides.
This is one grass weed control job where I want to be a few days too early, rather than a few days too late.
The penalties for these Group A pesticide residues in our clean and green mung bean crop is immense and brings along severe repercussions to our industry.
So what other insights could I mention here?
Talk to your marketer person before you plant a seed.
I could also say to plant about 25 to 30 days before 60mm of a steady rain event as that would top off all the plans above.
Reminder for an Australian Mungbean Association accreditation course in Emerald, starting January 16 that you need to book in for.