Where I am, it’s hot and dry during the summers. So, I will cut the bindweed at soil level and let it lay on the soil/woodchip surface where it dries out. I don’t till, so the pieces generally don’t get reburied. I imagine under moister conditions or significant tilling, some of the pieces would reroot.
Grateful for this thread! I think as has been suggested and with bindweed and many plants that thrive in disturbed landscapes (where it seems most modern humans live), the value is in restoring balance.
I think there are very few places on earth where the intelligence of nature has been so profoundly disturbed by human beings that the system actively skews towards imbalance. It seems to me (and to many people much more knowledgeable) that in most cases if we just stop messing with things, nature restores itself.
As with many weeds the internet says are poisonous but have seen widespread ethnobotanical use as food or medicine, I maintain a healthy and cautious skepticism about bindweed’s inedibility. If tomorrow I met a Cherokee nation elder who said you could eat it and the next day a Choctaw nation elder, I would be inclined to think at least some varieties are very likely edible 
.
If I could go back in time to the season our property was overrun with garlic mustard, I would have uprooted it and laid it on the ground or chopped and dropped it. Not pulled it all up and have it hauled to a dump. In retrospect, it had a role to play in our compacted and depleted soil. Other invasions have followed that we are still cycling through, though diversity increases with every season. We are still in the first ten years following decades of poisoning of the land to maintain a grass monoculture, and probably extractive agriculture before that.
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Good point about the edibility of bindweed. Plenty of garden plants have wild members of the same species that are mildly poisonous – beans, squashes, lettuce, etc. I bet bindweed could be domesticated to be poison-free, and it would probably taste good, since it’s related to sweet potatoes, and their leaves taste good.
That raises an interesting question, in fact. There are plenty of species whose leaves are mildly poisonous if eaten fresh, but just fine if they’re cooked. Mexican tree spinach, for instance. Bindweed might be the same way.
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I think even within plants of the same subspecies with extremely similar phenotypes this type of variation can exist, emphasizing the need for solid safety protocol when foraging.
I’ve eaten the honeyvine milkweed leaves, stem, and pods on our place. They were delicious - - cool, crisp, sweet, refreshing. Like cucumber. I’ve tried leaves of the same plant elsewhere in town where I know chemicals aren’t used and it was appallingly, worrisomely bitter. And usually I like bitter - - even very bitter medicinal wild lettuces. I think Green Deane may have done a post speaking to this kind of variation among milkweeds.
Wow, I hadn’t thought about that being an important thing to consider with foraging. But of course that makes sense. Why wouldn’t there be a lot of variation in levels of poison in wild species? If there weren’t, our ancestors could never have domesticated crops to breed the poisons out of them.
I think a general principle of, “Taste a bit, and if it’s more bitter than you expected, spit it out” is probably warranted with edible species.
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It reroots easily. The tiniest piece of stem or root in contact with the ground will start a new plant. Alternatively, if the cut stem has flowers on it (even immature flowers) it will try to bring the seeds to maturity.
that’s what i’m afraid of. I guess I could use it in a jadam liquid fertilizer bucket
Ooh, I like that idea. I have wondered if that would be a good way to kill it and extract its nutrition for other plants.
I’d have to go and relisten to a bunch but I want to say bindweed is one of the plants that are so indigestible fibrous that sheep have been ill and upon inspecting the guts the stomach can be a big knot of fibers. Totally incapacitating the animal to digest properly at all.
So some livestock info on wild plants may be useful. Basically just type in like “sheep toxicity bindweed” or “cow toxicity pine”. It can give different aspects, like animals grazing buckwheat can get photosensitivity so you need to keep it to a small amount.
Oh, that’s a shame!
Hee hee, but you never know, that fibrousness may be useful for some other purpose. Could it be used as a source of tough fibers to sew with, for instance?
I had a good laugh, a downright incredulous one, when I read about this plant:
And yet clearly some people like it for something (its medicinal properties? its prettiness?), otherwise the Experimental Farm Network wouldn’t be offering it.
I wouldn’t plant bitter sneezeweed. Boy howdy. To me, that plant looks very unwelcome. The last thing my family members with hay fever need is more plants that will make them sneeze. And it can make honey bitter! 
But I bet some people love it and plant it on purpose.
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Not a big fan of bindweed. I did notice that there is no bindweed near my Jerusalem artichoke patch. Apparently, Jerusalem artichoke has some alleopathic properties that deter (among others) bindweeds, so I am planning to plant some Jerusalem artichoke around my fences (where it is harder to pull out the bindweeds) and perhaps adding some tubers to a second Jadam liquid fertilizer bucket to see if that would kill bindweed as well
Maarten.
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I would be very interested to know if you have success killing bindweed with the Jerusalem artichoke liquid. That would be great. Hopefully it won’t kill anything you want to keep.
Just saw a thread on permies.com that discusses using various invasive plants to dye wool.
https://permies.com/t/65897/dyeing-invasives
It mentions bindweed as a source of dye! I see some golden-colored yarn in my future.
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Ooooh. Now that you mention it, my first Jerusalem artichoke plant that I grew next year had no bindweed or quackgrass around it, even though its tuber was planted in a spot where those have grown aggressively in the past.
Exxxxxxcellent. (Steeples fingers.)
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I will have to do some research on how much nutrition pigs get from Jerusalem Artichokes. I have been wondering for a while.
The leaves and stems have 28% protein (double that of corn), your pigs will feast like kings. I may try to: 1)Put in Jerusalem artichokes to kill the bindweed. 2)Let chickens roam to eat the nutritious leaves/stems of the sunchokes, the sunchokes will keep sending up shoots until the tubers die due to lack of energy left.3) You soil is now fertile thanks to the poop of the chicken aboveground and the decomposing tubers underground.
Oh! Jerusalem artichoke leaves and stems have that much protein? Wow, that’s really cool. That’s a good reason to eat them. I’m always trying to find ways to get a bit more protein from my garden, so I don’t need to buy as much of it.
I’ve been thinking about this for feasibility too, with pigs. Would have to be carefully timed so they left some tubers for next cycle.
Now you’ve gotten me wondering just how drought tolerant I can train sunflowers to be. Could I turn them into a short, edible groundcover that kills off the bindweed?
I got a sunflower volunteer last year that survived for four months without water. It got only four inches high, and it didn’t flower before dying. But it stayed alive for four months without any water whatsoever! And now that I think about it, there were no prickly lettuces or bindweeds around it.
Maybe sunflowers that are exceptionally drought tolerant could manage to get a few inches taller and squeeze out a flower and a few seeds. If so, I could landrace them.
Is it hilarious that I’m now thinking of turning sunflowers into a super duper short crop? 
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Apparently peas and sorghum are supposed to be allelopathic, too.
I’ve never noticed anything like that with peas, but I’m pretty sure the pink everlasting pea plants on the side of my yard are. I chopped them down last year to use for mulch. That mulch killed everything I put it under. Oops. 
I haven’t grown sorghum yet, but I’m planning to this year. I don’t think it’s allelopathic because I’ve seen it growing happily in garden beds along with other species, and there are sorghum volunteers from birdseed in the middle of one of my neighbor’s lawns. The grass looked fine. (Well, other than being dried and dead-looking because of no water, but it sprang back to life after the winter snows, like grass always does. Ironically, grass is at its healthiest and greenest and most verdant in midwinter here.)
Different plants use different allopathic techniques. Some are germination inhibitors. Others act on adult plants, or juvenile plants, or only interact with certain species.
I did notice this year in my sister’s yard that the mulberries had no bindweed growing on them, and neither did the wild lettuce.
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