Weed control in sunflower (helianthus annuus L.) with post-emergent herbicides

Sunflower is the most important oil crop in Hungary, is the base of the production of cooking oil and moreover takes an important part in production of margarine too. Extracted sunflower groats as a secondary product origining from the mentioned procedure can be used in forage successfully. The amount of harvested sunflower reaches the 20-25% of the EU's yield. The sowing area approaches 500 thousand hectares. The essential condition of successful crop production is the perfect weed control. Sowing areas are infected with monocotyledon and dicotyledonous weeds too. Annual dicotyledonous weeds are the most troublesome. The worst species is the Ambrosia artemisiifolia L. Many other weed species as Abutilon theophrasti MEDIC., Datura stramonium L. and Xanthium strumarium L. can cause serious damages. In our model experiments we examined the herbicide sensibility of two commercial sunflower cultivars as "Iregi szürke csikos", "Marica II" and a sulfonylurea-urea tolerant new hybrid "PR63E82". The experiment was set up under greenhouse conditions with the use of four important weed and different post-emergent herbicide as Modown 4F (bifenox), Pledge 50 WP (flumioxazin) and Granstar 75 DF (tribenuron-methyl). We applied normal and double doses too. Sunflower was cultivated to 4-6 leaf stage. Post-emergent herbicides were sprayed out when weeds were in 2, 2-4 and 4-6 leaf stage. Weed killer and phytotoxic effects of post-emergent herbicides were examined. We declared that development of weeds had significally effect on the effectiveness of different herbicides.