Ben I will have to agree with Mr. Steve! You have been extremely lucky that hogs have not got into your chufas. The 8 patches I planted on the club our first year got destroyed one plot at a time until they were all gone. That was the last time I attempted to plant them over there.

I planted 8 acres of Chufa one year, on my turkey lease in Barbour county. They didn’t have hogs, but would occasionally get one on a trail camera over corn. Like individual hogs 2-3x a year on camera. By turkey season, every inch of those chufa patches looked like the crater of the moon. Some holes were rooted 3’ deep. Obviously didn’t plant them again, and the hogs mostly disappeared within a few months.

Thanks for the right up PCP. I’m learning as I go with the Chufa plots. I put a couple fields in with a planter and 1 by broadcasting, both are doing well but the ones with the planter have a much better yield.
I’m planning to spray this week.

I’ve got a question, we get Johnson grass bad in one of our chufa plots. Will those herbicides kill it as well?

You could use some sort of wicking device to apply gly to the Johnson grass and not the chufa. I know a guy with a beautiful field of bermuda he does this to. He said it will usually take two applications to get rid of the johnson grass.

Clethodim

Yes, the Clethodim will keep it under control enough to make your chufa crop. If you have a well established Johnson grass stand in the field I don't think you are going to get completely rid of it with a single application each year. The roots are going to sprout enough after the chufas make to stay alive, and they will be ready to take off again the next year.

There are better herbicides to try to eradicate it, but I can't remember the name. You would probably need to not try to grow chufas for a couple of years and focus on eradication if you want to ever be rid of it.

Thanks so much for the response. I’ll just use Clethodim this year and hit the Johnson grass hard next.

For the benefit of those who have never grown chufas and would like to see how fast they grow, I will try to put up a picture about once a week. I took this one yesterday, July 20, which is 2 weeks after spraying them. You can see they have grown since the last picture, and it's also worth noticing that the tire tracks from the spraying are starting to disappear.

I think the plants are a little too thick in this field, but that's better than not being thick enough. Turkeys are already scratching some of them up, so there must be a few small tubers on them.

Looking good! All this rain is really making mine grow well!

We tried a couple of small patches of chufa on our club about 5 years ago. Everything was perfect. Got good rain. Not a single plant germinated. I assume we got bad seed.

I made a picture of the plot yesterday, and this is what it looks like now:



It's been right at 90 days since planting, and the tops of about half the chufa plants have turned brown and are done producing. It looks like they made a decent crop and turkeys are already using the patch daily. A lot of places look like this:




No doubt that the turkeys have damaged a lot of plants by digging them up when they first put on tubers. That's one of the downsides of having a small plot and having it in the same spot for 5 consecutive years. I would need to move it, but it's all that I have here.

I can blame the turkeys for some of the damage, but there are also plants with dead tops that the turkeys haven't touched. I have blamed this on the poor Coosa county soil in the past. At 90 days, my plots in Perry county are still green and growing, and they usually don't start dying until the 110 day mark. That last 20 days is when they really produce a lot of chufas, but that doesn't happen here. It is possible that some of it is insect damage, but I don't see any evidence of that. The little plot will still produce a lot of chufas; it's just disappointing that it dies out so soon.

You can see that there is a lot of crabgrass that has grown a lot in the past couple of weeks. It's normal to see that after 90 days, and I don't think it significantly reduces the yield. The chufas were much bigger than the crabgrass until they started dying down, so I don't think it would have been worth a second spraying.

Any of you other growers have issues with your plants dying out this early?

We plant about 250 lbs worth within a couple days of each other Mr. Steve. I’ve noticed the patches in the lower, more wet areas turn brown before the ones that drain better.

I checked some of mine yesterday and a lot of them are turning brown and the weeds are terrible but I never got a chance to spray them. I think they still made a pretty good crop

Thanks for the info. That could be part of the issue here, as the upper part of the patch is still green. There has definitely been a lot more rain than needed this year, so could have made it worse.

Guess that is Coosa county soil too? They definitely live longer on my Perry county land.

No sir, they’re in tallapoosa and clay county and it’s not ideal soil either

Yeah, in general I think Clay has even worse soil than Coosa. K Bush, they are already digging your's up too. You are down in the Land of Plenty. None of my turkeys would ever walk off and leave chufas lying on the ground like that.

Staged photo. I had pulled up a plant to see how the production was and dropped those by the tracks for a pic. Lots of scratching though.