Lots of folks have asked me through the years how long to wait to spray chufas and how much of what to use. My dad first grew chufas in the 60s and I helped him grow them for over 30 years. But understand, he was the boss and I was manual labor. He never used any herbicide except Treflan, and he moved the patches around to keep the weed problem from getting too bad. He passed away in 2000 and I had to start growing them alone if I wanted any

I tried Treflan the first year and was not happy with the results, so I started trying other herbicides. There isn't much research done on chufas that I'm aware of; the research money goes into ways to limit hunting. So sharing our own experience is probably the best way chufa growers can improve the process. I tried some really off the wall herbicides with mixed results, and then made some real progress after talking with Dr. Youngblood from Selma. He had found that Milestone was great for broadleaf weeds in chufas, and after about a decade of experimenting, I use it as the one broadleaf herbicide. I've tried mixing it with other things, but I use it alone now.

There are a lot of grass herbicides that will work fine, but Clethodim is usually the cheapest, so I have stuck with it for years now. The mixture of Milestone and Clethodim works well enough as an over the top application that I quit using a PRE at all. Let me emphasize that is primarily due to my laziness and thriftiness; it is a good thing to use a PRE and you will have fewer weeds if you use one. It isn't my goal to make maximum yield, but to produce the most efficient yield. With the new regulations that is going to be even more important for me.

So that's the background to the story for those who might be new around here. Though most of my chufas are in another county, I decided 5 years ago to make a demonstration chufa plot about 200 yards from my house. The plot is a measured .25 acre, so it's very small and the soil is not very good. I wanted to see if I could grow enough chufas on it to be of any real benefit to the relatively small local turkey population. I believe that it has been, but it's also been a plot that I can monitor daily and I have learned a lot from the project. In the 4 previous seasons, I've made 2 bumper crops, one that was average, and one that was poor due to lack of rain. The current crop has the chance to be good if it will keep raining.

I have tried to regenerate the plot each year by repeated discing. I don't know if Dr. Youngblood conceived this idea, but he wrote about it in a book published in the 90s. I can tell you that it works, and once you make a decent crop you can regenerate it each year by discing instead of new seed. That saves money, but it also keeps the chufas available for the turkeys. I made a nice crop in the field last year, and turkeys started feeding in it last August and continued through the winter. The following is what I've done to it since then.

Around the first of March, the ground had gotten hard and I wasn't seeing much activity. I ran the disc over 1/3 of the field, not cutting deeply but just enough to loosen the surface. Turkeys started back to using the disced areas, and over the next 3 months I disced all of the field at least 2 times. The soil had warmed enough by the first of April that young chufa plants started sprouting. That is what you want to see, and it doesn't hurt a thing to disc them under ; they will sprout right back. Dr. Youngblood believed that it actually makes the final plant stronger if you disced them under a couple of times before finally letting them grow.

Of course, you don't have to disc in strips the way I did. On my larger fields I try to disc once the first of April, once the first of May, and the final time in June. I don't want the young plants to get over about 3" tall before turning them under. I can't prove it, but it seems like it could take too much energy out of the tubers if you let the plants get too big. I had a good stand of 3" tall chufas on June 2. On that day, I put out 2 bags 13-13-13 and 9 sacks of pelletized lime. Remember that the patch is only 1/4 acre so that equals 400 lbs of T13 and 36 bags of lime per acre. It wasn't essential to do this, but I also added 15 lbs of seed at this time. There were a few gaps in the regenerated plants and with such a small field I wanted every bit of it to be growing chufas. I disced it all in and made the field as smooth as possible.

On June 13, which was 11 days later, it looked like this:



There was a good stand up due to some nice rain. Last year I had to put a scarecrow in the field to try to keep the turkeys from digging up the chufas, but I didn't see too much of that this year. Loss of chufas to turkeys and varmints was another reason that I added the extra seed. They can really damage such a small field.

On July 4, the field looked like this and was ready to be sprayed:



There is an excellent stand of chufas, but it also has grass and morning glories that would soon get out of hand. An ATV with a 25 gallon sprayer is great for spraying chufas, but I don't have access to one here. Instead, I used my golf cart with a 15 gallon sprayer. It looks like this:

squirtle wallpaper

The sprayer covers a path 14' wide, so I put markers 14' apart at each end of the field and to keep myself straight and timed each pass with my watch. I took 50 seconds to make each pass and I ran out of water just as I finished. I put only 8 gallons of water into the sprayer and added 4 oz of 80/20 surfactant, .5 oz of Milestone, and 2.5 oz Clethodim. That is a rate of 2 oz of Milestone and 10 oz of Clethodim per acre, and those are the rates I have settled on. You might get away with using a little more Milestone if you have a serious broadleaf problem, but more Clethodim is likely to damage the chufas.

I will post more pictures as the year goes along, and I only post this for educational purposes for all of us. Feel free to disagree with me on any point and post your pics and experience, especially if different from mine.