Planting directly into grass certainly highlights weaknesses and strengths. I think I got 10-20% germination and most plants aren’t sprawling/spreading yet.
Some did better than others, of course. A few are absolutely loving this environment.
A good thing we have such a long growing season.
I’m planning to oversow my grass with a whole bunch of cover crop seeds this autumn. I realized that if I want something better than bindweed, it would help if I introduce a whole lot of suggestions that I prefer. 
Replace it with things that fill the same niche. I replaced the tall grassy weeds with oats, for example. Dandelions with lettuce, and so on. I have some ideas to work on the bindweed, but they’re going to have to wait until next year.
Ooh, that’s a smart idea! I really like the idea of thinking in terms of outcompeting the specific niche of each weed species I want to get rid of!
I would love ideas for edible plants that fill the same niche as bindweed. That sounds clever. Any ideas? I wonder if maybe tepary pole beans could do it? They’re also a drought tolerant small vine. And a nitrogen fixer, to boot.
Here’s something interesting:
Growing alfalfa has been shown to greatly reduce or eliminate bindweed.(Cox, 1909) The frequent cutting for hay and the smothering effect of the crop puts bindweed at a disadvantage. Hay cutting works like mowing and tillage to reduce top growth. Once cut, the alfalfa grows faster than bindweed and shades it out.
Two or three years of alfalfa in the crop rotation will greatly reduce bindweed in a following corn crop.
Source:
Maybe I should grow alfalfa?
The big trouble I see with that is that my mom grew up in New Mexico, and she said her parents accidentally sowed a lawn of alfalfa (it was supposed to be clover; they were given the wrong seeds), and it was unpleasant to walk on and perennial and impossible to get rid of.
I still think that’d be better than bindweed because it’s edible, but that does seem like a potential source of concern. I want to replace weeds with plants I’ll enjoy growing wild in my lawn.
I’m going to split this into a separate thread. Your idea is so awesome, I bet we could have a long discussion full of ideas that a lot of people would benefit from.
Grass is the one thing that I struggle with in my polyculture weedy low-work style of gardening where I’m trying to use as much of my tree’d 1/2 acre for food/ornamentals without working on it more than an hour a day. Here, grass really makes adjacent plants struggle and tarping kills volunteers or perennials so I’m limited where I can use that method. Mulching works really well but brings an abundance of slugs and it’s a bunch of work (granted: in the off season). Wherever I can, I let cover crops reseed themselves as a green mulch, like clover (which makes great soil for me when grown thickly) or alfalfa (which doesn’t take over for me) or barley. Anything that can be pulled or chopped and dropped with ease. Although lush growth does bring extra bugs (I don’t spray) and direct seeded plants struggle. I’m happy to transplant bigger plants. Chick weed would be ideal throughout the garden because it stays shallow and it’s super easy to pull out or spread apart when I’m transplanting. Plus the chickens love it. Purslane would be ideal as well but it doesn’t proliferate. Lambs quarters is nice but it grows up rather than wide. Right now I have jewelweed everywhere which is great because it has such shallow roots and relatively good biomass that I can pull/drop several at once as I walk by with just a light tug. It’s probably worth checking out alleopathic properties of each thing that pops up…I’m on a hill as well and found that terracing with little channels helps keep the moisture in without excessive mulching.
I like as a first principle maximum photosynthesis for the soil.
Could winged yams (Dioscorea alata) work? I haven’t worked with them, but Zero Input Agriculture has written about them. I also vaguely recall Dave the Good mentioning them in one of his videos, but I don’t remember for sure which one. (It might have been one of the ones linked somewhere here on the forum, but don’t hold me to it.) We have a different, inedible Dioscorea that’s pretty aggressive down here and its growth pattern kind of reminds me of how I remember bindweed up north.
I’m not sure how cold tolerant it is, though.
Fall planted lentils outcompeted bindweed miraculously well this past season - surprise! Bindweed comes up in the spring under almost anything (winter wheat, vetch, rye) and can still be a problem, but the densely planted lentil beds have essentially zero bindweed even though those beds had it last year. (thank goodness bindweed tops winter kill) I’m experimenting with “planting green” into the lentils – tomato transplants seem to be doing well. Direct seeding I think would be a challenge without removing the lentils first. The lentils pulled out super easily, though (unlike clover, which also competes well with bindweed if it has a head start) and seem to make nice mulch.
During the growing season sweet potatoes outcompete bindweed when we weed it first – no need for continued weeding.
Direct seeding into bindweed did not work great last year, so with the help of volunteers and my summer crew we’ve executed a weeding campaign this year as we flipped beds – after spending time seriously weeding it last month, the second growth bindweed is surprisingly easy to (mostly) pull and stay on top of so far. We have 1/6th of an acre and extra hands right now. Realistically, we probably won’t be able to stay on top of it for the whole growing season.
While it’s drought tolerant, bind weed seems to really like disturbed, irrigated, nutrient rich, loose soil, even sheet mulch – gardens! At home, it has lived on the side of our gravel road for years, but hates life there – only started spreading a bit this year with our unusual amount of spring rains.
Side note: purslane would be such a lovely “replacement” for bindweed, but purslane is so much less aggressive. I jump for joy when we do have it - yum!
I know what you mean about purslane. It refuses to grow in my lawn – it only wants to grow in my garden beds. It does great when it’s irrigated, but it just straight out dies if it’s not. It’s not very drought tolerant, despite being a succulent. Yes, it’s a weed here, but it only shows up in irrigated spaces like lawns and sidewalk cracks and garden beds; it doesn’t show up in the dry wild spaces, sadly.
I’ve wondered if sweet potatoes may be able to outcompete bindweed! They’re both in the morning glory family, after all. Can sweet potato leaves handle being walked on? That’s a pretty important factor to determine whether something will outcompete bindweed for me.
Lentils are a very interesting idea. Maybe I should add those to my cover crop mix.
Huh, it looks like jewelweed is edible, and it’s even a cure for nettles and poison ivy! Sounds like a great weed to have in your ecosystem.
Maybe I should try planting sunflowers in some of the spots where the bindweed is most vigorous. They’re supposed to be a little allelopathic, and they’re drought tolerant. And they’re edible, and pretty, so they’d be fine in, say, a flowerbed in the front yard.
Winged yams are pretty tropical, though chinese yams are a more temperate equivalent.
Which species naturally dominates which space is a really interesting, complex puzzle with so many factors. I don’t think anybody will ever be able to analyse a particular patch of soil and predict which species will naturally dominate given the chance.
It is worth remembering that even “natural” systems feature a shifting constellation of disturbance factors (especially insect and vertebrate grazing and trampling). In human managed systems we have to find sustainable ways to apply selective disturbance as well.
One tool I think that modern culture has forgotten is the hoe. A well made and well maintained hoe can allow a single person to manage weed pressure before it becomes back breaking provided the initial disturbance is applied by something like a plough or livestock (or today maybe a single round of sheet mulching to kill pasture). The trick is hoeing regularly and selectively in my experience, which means getting to know every single weed species and its lifecycle.
Another underappreciated tool is the hand sickle. I like the serrated Kama types they still make well in Japan. Whenever it is too wet to hoe weeds I will often simply hand sickle the tops off before they get a chance to seed heavily. Most weeds lose the will to do much after being cut back to their roots a couple times. If you are growing naturally vigorous crops they will usually smother the weed rootstocks after a round or two.
I never expect my crops to completely dominate all the weeds under their own power, but the ideal are crops that are vigorous enough that it only takes a few light touches on my part to tip the balance in their favour.
I think part of it is nutrient balance. Not only do plants of a particular type use the same nutrients, but they alter the soil around them.
Garlic, for example, puts out sulfur through its roots. Enough that beans, which need very little sulfur, get sulfur toxicity and die. Tomatoes, on the other hand, need more sulfur than most plants and do very well with garlic as a neighbor.
I haven’t started testing this stuff in my new location yet. I’ll start on that process next year. I’m going to see if any of my plants bring bindweed under control.
I hesitate to actually cultivate bindweed, but controlled testing during the winter might be the most effective in that sense.
I didn’t know that about garlic! 
Are there any other plant families alliums are particularly good or bad with?
It’s worth mentioning that rediscovering and using weeds as food and medicine is just as important as replacing them with the narrow range of foods that modern humans are familiar with.
I don’t mean like deliberately introducing knotweed or other poorly behaving yet highly edible crops to an area they don’t already grow in abundance, but rather growing well-behaved, naturalized, or native plants that have a clear record of ethnobotanical usage by indigenous peoples.
Replacing an invasive weed with a keystone wildlife species, even if limited in culinary and medicinal utility, also seems like a win
Yes, all good points! There are quite a few edible weeds I am happy to encourage. Purslane, hoary cress, salsify, and yellow dock are all great, for example. The quackgrass and johnson grass are fine, too – the seed heads are nonbothersome when I step on them, so they’re a perfectly fine ground cover.
The foxtail grass, I want out. Also the other species of grass that has even nastier, pricklier seed heads. And the prickly lettuce (which I know can be used as a painkiller, but it’s definitely poisonous, and invasive, and it will cross with my edible lettuces, and those thorns are horrendous). And those goatheads are beyond unwelcome. Thorns and burrs aren’t welcome, period.
I might permit some edible grasses with poky seed heads to live in a corner of my yard where it isn’t meant to be stepped on as a groundcover. Wheat, rye, and so forth. Those seem to grow wild in our state, and they’re fine as long as I’m eating the seed heads and not getting them stuck to my socks.
Meanwhile, can you think of any value in bindweed? That’s by far the biggest invasive I have to deal with right now. It’s not nearly as big a deal as, say, burr grass or goatheads; it’s quite pretty and harmless. It’s just that it’s so invasive that I want to get rid of it because there seems to be no way to keep it in balance when it’s around.
I’m blessed to have goats. Everything that used to be a weed is now precious feed to save for a (not so) rainy day.
In my vegetable garden I encourage chickweed (both the temperate and tropical species), tolerate spanish needle and a long list of other species. The only ones I really focus on pushing out are the running grasses since they need a fair bit of physical work to kill off (though when I had a flock of geese they took care of it for me on a rotational basis).
The way I look at it, any plant species that wants to grow the most vigorously in your space is increasing the net photosynthesis for free. You’d better think long and hard before breaking your own back to reject such a generous offer. The more you diminish sincere photosynthetic output, the harder you have to work to import carbon and cycle nutrients for your precious crops to offset the long term effects.
Great way to think about the value of weeds, Shane! Emily, I feel your pain regarding bindweed. After all the lovely spring rains this year, everything looks great, including the bindweed. I cut it back and use it as mulch but don’t make much effort to dig down and remove the roots. I’ve tried it before but learned that it’s more persistent than me. My tactic now is to encourage other plants to populate the area. I doubt I’ll ever completely get rid of it, but the bees enjoy it and I can live with that.
Wait a second, I just realized something! Winter annual grains might work really well under fruit trees! They’ll get full sun in winter, which is when they’re growing, and they’ll die down and turn totally dry by late spring, which is when the fruit trees will need all the water and benefit from the extra mulch.
That would outcompete any grasses (or other weeds) that want to grow up against the trunks and steal their water during the summer. And there’s loads of water in winter, so there’d be plenty for the fruit trees and the grains.
And that’s a spot out of the pathways, so it won’t matter if the seed heads are poky. Especially since I’ll be harvesting them for grains as soon as they’re ready to harvest anyway.
I think I should try that!
I’d be interested in seeing this grain alley cropping, but I think for minimum impact on Fruit tree growth you’ll want a legume in that mix like a dutch white clover or a fava bean.
I’m actually doing something quite similar with a chestnut tree. If I remember, I’ll tell you how it goes.
As for bindweed, you can’t trust it. I remove invasives for a living, and I can tell you it’s never going to play nice. It’ll die, but you do need some persistence. If you break up the soil before pulling on major roots, you get the fleshy white tuber parts and it won’t return. In the PNW I recommend getting it once in spring, cutting it back all summer, and then rooting it out again in fall once it’s rained.
Just make sure the trowel gets down at least four inches.
Find a way to make a plant useful and it transforms from a painful weed to a valuable resource overnight. Bindweed is good feed for rabbits and guineapigs (though some sources disagree for the latter).
I have noticed something interesting- after I cut a weed back a few times to feed my goats it often seems to loose all interest in growing in my garden. It is almost like they know what is going on. A hand sickle with daily cutting to feed your animals can chew through an enormous amount of biomass. Cutting fresh feed for your grateful animals is a lot more enjoyable than pulling up roots while cursing the plant gods.
I often dig down two feet deep in order to remove rocks, or to prepare swales, and I often remove bindweed roots. I’ve never seen tubers! Just roots that go down and down and down, seemingly forever. Is the bindweed in the southwest different from the northwest? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are multiple related species.
(Laugh.) Yes, I’m sure that’s true.
I try to pull up bindweed sprouts every day. It seems to be necessity, otherwise it takes over. It . . . never loses interest in my garden. It’s possible that’s because my garden is the only place with moist soil anywhere near the surface during the summer. The bindweed survives just fine in completely dry, compacted dirt, but it grows enthusiastically and vigorously when it gets lots of water.