Is there value in bindweed?

General Discussions
41

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.

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42

Yeah, that sounds interesting! And also, I should clearly not use sunflower leaves as mulch in my garden. :wink:

43

I’ve found value in bindweed!

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! :smiley:

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44

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

45

Sadly, field bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis) isn’t edible. It’s mildly poisonous. And that’s the species I have.

Hedge bindweed (Calystegia sepium) is edible, and it may be a great semi-crop for anyone who has it!

In case this is useful to identify which kind you have in your yard:

46

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.

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47

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. :slight_smile:

48

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.

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49

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.

50

That image is comedic on a small phone screen :joy:

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51

Is bindweed good for feeding the chickens and I noticed the buying weed I have the storage roofs are not woody there just oversight roots thick roots

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Endless scrolling experience!

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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).

Here’s one study https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003194229400969Z

54

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.

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My soil is pure sand, so long carrots do fine; in fact, deep roots are probably better for drought tolerance.

Yeah, I chop and drop bindweed as mulch, as with all other weeds, but man, covering up bindweed does not kill it. I can cover an area with five layers of cardboard and two feet deep of wood chips, and the bindweed will manage to grow up through all of that within three months. (I’m speaking from experience here.) The stars of Bethlehem, too. Some weeds are really stubborn. The only way to get rid of either of them is to actively dig them out – and while that works just fine to remove star of Bethlehem bulbs, it only works about quarter of the time to get rid of bindweed, which has really deep roots that grow back really fast. That stuff is tough.

I would say if I pick bindweed from a specific space every single day for about 50 days straight – and it will grow back about two inches long, or even more, every single day, by the way – that might kill it. But it usually doesn’t. It usually just slows it down. By pulling out bindweed several times a week every time I see it for four years, I have managed to eradicate the least vigorous patches, which is great. But the most vigorous spots haven’t even slowed down. That weed. :dagger:

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56

OMG, the deep roots. You had spoke about it before…im remembering the chore you had growing with it. Tarping spots for a whole season, taking away the light, then till…maybe every two years. Or go deeper with wood chips layer. But maybe covering it with wood chips just keeps it dormant. Do you clear small patches to grow in every season…does it go to seed too?

57

:sweat_smile:

Boy, does bindweed go to seed. Boy, do those seeds love germinating. And boy, do those seedlings grow quickly. I have gotten very proactive about watching for little white morning glory flowers and yanking those things out of the ground before they can set seeds, but the soil seed bank still has loads of seeds in it.

I have learned to recognize bindweed seedlings at a glance, so I yank those things out the instant I see them. Happily, they’re easy to recognize – the cotyledons are almost heart-shaped, but only just barely, so they look different from brassica seedlings. They’re also dark green, and the brassica cotyledons I see are usually light green.

Happily, the seedlings die when they’re pulled up, because they only have about two inches of taproot when they’re in the cotyledon stage. Whew! :face_exhaling:

I’ve gotten very good at recognizing bindweed leaves at a glance, and I’ve cultivated a habit of yanking them out whenever I see them, even if I’m in the middle of something else, because if I don’t, they’ll be ten times larger and probably full of flowers by the time I next notice them a week later. :person_facepalming:

I can sometimes manage to kill a bindweed patch by digging a hole four feet down and extracting all the roots I find. That’s often sufficient for the moderately vigorous patches. So I’ve been doing a lot of that. I dig three to four feet down, remove all the enormous rocks (my soil is pure sand for about a foot, and then it’s rocks all the way down), add a bunch of wood and kitchen scraps, and cover it up with the remaining sand.

The thing is, that’s extremely time-consuming, so I can only do one small section at a time. Once I’ve done that section, I want it to be no-till, so I stick perennials in it and add a deep mulch of wood chips on top. My orchard is now almost entirely bindweed-free (hurray!), and one of the sections where I sowed the carrots in is, too.

And speaking of carrots, I got Chocolate Dara carrot seeds from the local seed library last year, and I sowed them in a spot I’ve pulled all the weeds out of. A bunch of them look to have germinated! I should probably tuck some bindweed mulch gently around those seedlings soon. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: I’m really hoping that variety will turn out to be a carrot that likes my yard. :blush: I know it’s intended to be ornamental, but I’m sure it’s still edible, and it very likely tastes good. Do you know anything about how it tastes?

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58

Geez, that bindweed is super invasive and most of the remediation included herbacide.. probably not an option. Its in the morning glory family, maybe change the pH of the soil to more alkaline with wood ashes, and plant with rings or bands of supershade vegetables. Or grow hedges with bands of shading varietes, fruit trees, or wind break types. Can you grow sugarcane? Or any tall grass with food value? Or maybe sorghum? Invasive species are the worst. We were just alerted to “stinknet” its taking over Southern California and been spotted in Arizona. I have not seed any and we are having a super dry year still and much of the native grasses and wildflowers didnt germinate around us…well, very spotty, scattered rain, no covering rain storms as of yet.
I have not grown chocolate carrots. Ive had the yellow, orange and red/purple types grow.