Dumb question, have you tried cover crops? Or are you talking your overall property? Reason is I'm thinking about trying it this year just not sure what would be best. Thinking wr but not sure yet. The key in my mind is to deplete the seed bed. If you can keep the weeds from seeding as.much as possible you should be able to get ahead of them.
I'm gaining in some spots failing in others but I'm going to keep trying.
I'm just talking about plots. For our purposes, food plots and cover crops are the same thing. I've tried about every kind of cover crop there is with the exception of the really odd ones like african cabbage, mung beans, and popcorn. I even once ponied up for specialty silage corn (has very thin yellow shell. The yellow shell is indigestible) and old school cheap grazing corns (short stalk, early maturity, the kind that make small cobs, less kernel rows, and edible stalks).
There are some truths to be had in the question you're asking:
You cannot deplete the seed bank.
Even if you could in theory, you couldn't keep new seeds from blowing in, washing in, falling off muddy hooves/nappy hides/boots/tires, hitching a ride in dirty seed, or getting pooped out by wandering critters. All natural plants have resiliency mechanisms to ensure their survival. The most common is
resistance to germination. To be understand this, consider the weakest seed out there, and it's manmade: The GMO soybean. In most cases, if you plant beans at the wrong time, they'll never come due to soil being cold, and they'll never survive the winters up north. Consider the other end of the spectrum, the thistle seed. Thistle seed can stay viable for 50 years or more.
The only way to beat them is to prevent the conditions that trigger their germination. Fallow periods (even short ones) cause massive changes in organic acids and fungal and bacterial populations in the soil that trigger the response to happen. That's the catalyst for calling them up from the grave.
I've gone so far to give as much advantage to certain weeds as possible on my land and they largely fail, because I failed to also provide the conditions for them to thrive. Two primary examples are common ragweed and canada thistle. You should have seen the cloud of thistle seed from that little patch I let go to maturity last year, it was everywhere and it was floating away like helium balloons all over my north plot. The original thistle patch is still there, but weakening compared to last year. Now, having created all that new seed, if I were to spray gly out there, I most certainly would summon the thistle crop to end all thistle crops.
I've also spread 3 pounds of ragweed seed on my property, and in every perennial plot I've started since 2021. That's 165,000 seeds onto fallowed dirt from heavy excavation work on around 2.5 acres of plot space. I bet you I haven't successfully germinated 50 ragweed plants in 5 seasons after all that seed. Now, I had a buddy that would disc and pack the shit out of his sandy loam soil, and the only thing he could grow is ragweed, and he never introduced a seed.
The other big truth is,
well planned diverse perennial mixes outperform single species crops, period. When i say outperform, I mean in resilience to drought, flood, heat, cold, weed intrusion, bug problems, heavy grazing, etc.
Menoken farm did a cover crop demo plot in prepration for a field day years ago. They planted tiny squares of all sorts of cover crops, but they planted each one alone. When they were done installing the plot, they mixed all the remainders together, and planted one last square. Drought came through and killed every single species plot. What was amazing was, the square where they mixed them all together, none of them died. It's the synergy from those plants working together that enabled their survival. They were all producing something and exchanging nutrients and moisture with each other and the soil organisms, and it was all tied together by mycorhizal fungi.
Man I am wordy tonight.
