The benefits of cover crops!

What’s next?

Many Mid-Missouri growers struggle with perennial weeds like bermuda grass (Cynodon dactylon), bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis), and johnsongrass (Sorghum halepense). As perennials, they come back each season, and they have deep roots with stored energy that allow them to resprout up after weeding. 

Bermudagrass, in particular, can spread by way of both stolons and rhizomes, and so when it is tilled, and ripped into pieces in the process, each chopped piece can root as a new plant - no fun!

Back in 2017, we read and applied principles from this fact sheet from The Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture, in Oklahoma, in the conversion of perennial-weed infested sod into vegetable production. Namely, we utilized their advice for killing bermuda grass through 2 main practices:

1. Winter weed cultivation - Bermudagrass plant parts can not survive frosts, and so we used a field cultivator dragged behind our tractor to rake up the rhizomes of the bermudagrass, and kill them through exposure to winter frosts. With each ripping, we could pull from deeper and setback more of the bermudagrass through frost-kill.

2. Summer tall-growing cover crop plantings - By May and when there’s no longer risk of frost, we would start with a drastically setback bermudagrass stand, and seed into the field a tall, smothering cover crop called sorghum x sudangrass (aka sudex) to outcompete the surviving bermudagrass for sunlight. Sudex can grow 5-12’ tall, for 2-3 mowings per summer, and send deep roots into our field to decompact these soils, where decades of it

We found success utilizing these two steps for two growing seasons, in 2018 and 2019, to eradicate these existing perennial weeds, without the use of herbicide, before then beginning to grow lots of tasty vegetables to donate toward local hunger relief in the fall of 2019. Today, we produce over 30,000 pounds of produce from this 1 acre field annually! 

We’re now in the process of replicating this work in the conversion of another acre of ground toward specialty crop production!

As we work up the existing weeds and plant cover crops to outcompete, we’ll also be taking opportunities to incorporate compost, biochar, and mineral amendments to improve the soil’s fertility for the present cover crops, and for future fruit and vegetable production.