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| Well, lets see, the carbon is mixed with a starter fert blend that is somewhat talored to your soil requirements. I dont know, but will try to find out, what the lbs/acre of charcoal product rate is, but on 18" spacing planting, here the suggested mixed solution rate is 30 gallons/acre. So, me being somewhat a cautious person, I run 34 to 35 gallons/acre.:-)
Karmex application after planting is also somewhat variable. You can go right away(the same day) or you can wait up to maybe 5 days depending on things like soil temp and moisture, to get a sprout of weeds and then mix some glyphosate with the karmex. That's a common practice here also, however I got burned once waiting for the sprout cause it rained and I ended up killing a few of the germinated fescue plants too.:-( Oh well, thats farming. Ask your local feild reps about tank mixing other residual type herbicides in your area. I'm planting tall fescue, and chickweed is easy to clean out of the field. In fact, that field in the picture is a bad chickweed field.
Band width?, the narrower the better.:-) Another member here that goes by "Grasseed" is way more knowledgable than I, but, I prefer to risk a bit wider band. My band width is between 1/2" and 1" wide. Sometimes in a hard spot that the drill cant penetrate well, it may get to 1 1/4" or so.
Now, on the running over the bands. That is again a risky question cause it depends on so many variables. "FOR THE MOST PART!!" no, it dont hurt anything to run over the bands. I dont have a ggod pcture of my setup from the back, but I do try to offset the tires to run between the rows as much as possible for planting. The drill I'm running does run over the last row planted, but the tire has enough cleat tread to ride up on the cleats. The little carbon tank I'm pulling has one tire running perfect, but the other one runs right up against a planted row.
I'm including a picture of the cusom hire guys setup. He runs these floater tires when he sprays Karmex after planting, and has no problems at all. Where you can run into problems is if you have sticky soil and the tires pull it up behind you, or if you have traction tires that scrub a lot.
Cost per acre? A lot.:-) I really should'nt give a number for that right now since it may vary so much from my location to yours.
You'll likely find as many different interpretations of the theory behind carbon planting as there are farmers that use it. I, for the most part, go by the theory that the grass plant can grow upward through chemically charged soil, but cant grow downward through it. So, if some soil falls in over the band, which it does, its not a problem as long as the seed is below the band of carbon.(charcoal/carbon, sorry if I'm confusing the issue, I use both words to describe the same thing) Some folks will run the field after planting with a flat roller.
Here's a few pics of our local custom hire guys rig. He runs a "truvee"?? opener. There is also a set of s-tines in front of the drill for planting in the trench. This is usually done in the spring without carbon to get the seed to stay in the moisture for a longer period of time. Used in the fall, you do run some risk of soil washing/erosion if you get too much rain too soon. One thing about my setup that I like better is the carbon nozzles are closer to the opener disks.
The field he's in here, is one that we had him plant last year.
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Started planting grass this week. (few pics)
