In one of the gardening groups sunflower alleopathy was talked about recently. It was mostly agreed that in practice the alleopathy was mostly from where the leaves had fallen/the plants had been left. And lots of people planted them with other plants just fine, not having problems with the supposed root exudates that are alleopathic. Most agreed that it wasn’t a problem if you pulled out the plants, the area would have no alleopathy problems. But if you left the plant/leaves on the ground that area would have alleopathy problems.
Sounds like sunflower cover crop that is chop and dropped would be ideal for weedy areas.
They’re really, really good at spreading. They’re really, really annoying to pull off of garden plants that they climb. They’re almost impossible to get rid of, and I really want them out of my yard altogether.
However, as long as they’re here . . .
They have no thorns or poky parts.
They’re quite easy to pull out. (They just happen to grow back within one day and grow about two inches a day, good grief.)
They’re extremely drought tolerant. As in, they’re still happy to be a ground cover when almost everything else in my unirrigated arid back yard is dead for the summer.
And thus we see . . . (steeples fingers) . . . that they’re making pretty great chop-and-drop mulch for my peanut beds!
I can’t mulch peanuts in wood chips, you see (they need a soft mulch so they can burrow their flowers underground), and they’re not drought tolerant, so they need a deep mulch in my climate. Bindweed seems to working pretty well for that!
Is fine weed edible because it’s in the same family as sweet potatoes I’ve never eaten either one but I’m curious if it is because it does have a very abundant crop
Some people mentioned that bindweed might not be as competitive in a forest garden environment. That has not been the case for me in my 3D perennial garden. The plant that is out-competing and behaving most imperialistically is without comparison bindweed. All the other weeds we’ve had to deal with before - ground elder, nettle, grass - have over time decreased and are now very manageable as the perennial ground-cover is in place. The problem with bindweed is that shading it out doesn’t work very well, as it simply grows up through the herb canopy.
Mulches have to be minimum 6 inches to be effective and it is crucial to go through the area several times over the first two seasons. If it manages to come up to the light, those leaves will send back energy and nutrients to the rest of the rhizome and keep it alive. When you then remove the mulch, the roots will have survived. After 1-2 seasons of having been robbed of light under mulch, the bindweed is gone for us. It only survives if it is allowed to harvest sun light around the edges of the mulch. Remember, the plant is rhizomatic, so treat “all the bindweed plants” as one clone.
Yeah, I pretty much have to pull mine out every day. Every day. If I manage to get all the way down to their thick, woody roots, and there’s at least a few inches of mulch on top of the soil, they may not come back – or they may, but it takes a month, which is a welcome respite. The problem is that it’s awfully tough to dig up those rhizomes while there are other plants around them whose roots I don’t want to disturb.
I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to eliminate some bindweed patches altogether by digging up the thick, woody roots in the winter and then deep mulching the spot, so there’s hope.
Which species is this? I assumed the field bind weed we have here (Convulvulus arvensis) did not have a woody rhizome, but now I begin to doubt myself. It also occured to me that I never looked up how it actually grows deeper down and must admit I was shocked when I saw this excavation from 1960 on brown agricultural soil (glacial till underground, clay loam). Roots extend over 2 meter down.
I’ve heard roots can go fifty feet down. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would certainly fit with it being so hard to eradicate.
I can personally attest that bindweed roots definitely go three feet down and much further, having dug down that far to try to get rid of them. They just keep going and going and going, well past the sand layer of my soil and deep into the “pure rocks all the way down” layer.
If you want to try feeding bindweed to your farm animals, I would advice to look up possible toxicity risks. Convulvulus contains several problematic alkaloids that can poison some animals (pigs, horses), but reports also exists that they don’t affect others (sheep, possibly pigs).
Yeah, they’re harder and thicker and browner and tougher, but not exactly woody. Noticeably different from the usual white roots that snap more easily, though. I think those are storage rhizomes, which would explain why bindweed is so drought tolerant.
