I was given a free bale of “straw” that turns out to have had lots of oat seed in it. Now I’ve got little grasses popping up in all my beds. I’m inclined to not worry about it, since these are very diverse, polyculture veggie beds. Any reason I’m being too chill about this?
i often plant (erm, haphazardly scatter) oats in my beds, if you have animals that need forage they love it! It's not super invasive like other things, and in my experience it doesn't attract any specific pests. I figure anything I can chop and drop (or that I can easily pull out, it's not like a dandelion that's hard to remove) is fine.
I think as Tereza says, if the oats are tending to overcrowd your crop, they are easy to remove. They can get quite tall.
Oats have a number of benefits however : they are tolerant of a wide range of conditions and produce a fair amount of biomass both above and below ground. Being annuals they won't be persistent weeds unless you let them seed. You might get some edible oats from them for you or livestock or wildlife (most likely!) if you do let them seed. I'm pretty sure the root exudates of oats are very high in beneficial sugars for soil organisms. I couldn't find a handy online reference for this, but I'm pretty sure that when I was working out my crop rotation they scored pretty highly.
I like growing oats, it seems to distract the bunnies from eating other things. When they get tall enough, if I need to remove them I just grab the whole bunch and pop it out of the dirt. I tend to crimp the stalks and then lay the hunk down with the roots towards the sky. It breaks down pretty decently.
i also may be mistaken but i think oat straw has medicinal uses. Need to ask the herbal medicine folks here about how big the plant needs to be to harvest, but if i recall correctly it's good for nerve stuff/relaxation, and who doesn't need that every so often?
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