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?