Replacement edge plants

I am working at a new location, one acre with a hedgerow around three sides. 30 + inches of rain per year, primarily acidic clay soil, and I don't know how long I'll be here.

Last year I was here for a couple weeks and I identified pokeweed (poisonous to humans and livestock, winter feed for birds--the bindweed seems to ignore it) and bindweed (smothers everything in its path, carpets the ground with vines that might as well be piano wire, no uses I can think of except maybe goat feed and I don't have goats). But taking out one plant leaves a gap for something else to move in.

So my first question is what do these plants do? What do they put into the soil, take out of the soil, etc., that makes them such great colonizers? In researching I found that pokeweed is considered a "hyperaccumulator" for zinc and Manganese. Bindweed is a bioaccumulator for copper. Someone else here on permies said that it's a calcium accumulator, but I can't find any research supporting that.

Second, what can I replace them with to fill that niche in the hedgerow? I want to transition the hedgerow to be the start of a forest garden. Right now it's full of red cedar (actually a form of juniper) and mulberries.

I throw both poke and bindweed in with my chickens.
They don't eat them but they do shred them.
I don't know what could replace bindweed, it competes with everything else in my land scape, including itself.
Sweet potatoe vines maybe?

Poke pops up anywhere a bird might poop.
It is edible when handled properly,  but I don't think its worth the time it takes to process.
Comfrey, rhubarb, fennel or burdock all seem like they could take the place of poke.

I grew up playing with pokeweed.  I thought the berries made a great dye.

Birds like pokeweed berries, too.

If the plants don't pose a problem for you why not keep them?

I like to recommend hostas as an edge plant.  The hostas come in a variety of patterns.

I was reading about the top forage plants the other day and these all would make nice edge plants for a forest garden: Chickweed, dandelions, Henbit, Pink Evening Primrose, and Turk's Cap.

Pollinators would probably love them too.

Turk's Cap is the tallest of these.

Could you clarify if these plants are growing in your hedgerow, and you want to replace them, or they are growing next to your hedgerow and you want to keep them from intruding, or they are already inside the hedgerow and you want to get rid of them?  

We use comfrey and hostas for edge areas where we want to stop things like quack grass from intruding.  Comfrey works especially well for blocking things, both good and bad, in a pretty large circle if you don't cut it.  It gets 4 or 5 feet tall and then falls to all sides in a big circle and smothers anything in that area.  In the spring I can tell where a comfrey plant is by the large ring of nothing growing before the comfrey leaves pop up.  I use comfrey as a perimeter plant around areas I have cleared of undesirables or am clearing of the same, and don't want the bad guys creeping back in from the sides.  My old place had lots of quack grass, so I would kill an area and then make a double staggered row of comfrey all the way around to keep the quack from moving back into the cleared area.  We generally use hostas in rings around things in mowed areas to make it easy to mow without weed eating, but I think hosta would keep out bad guys as well from an area.  Ijust don't usually have as many hostas available to use for that, although my lady is changing that.  She is hosta-hoarder, and  I am a comfrey-collector.  She would probably phrase it the opposite...

Anything you can plant that grows fast enough to outpace the bindweed and is dense enough to block the sun under it should work well.  

Anne Miller wrote:If the plants don't pose a problem for you why not keep them?

The bindweed will pull down trees if it gets out of hand. I have waged war on this stuff most of my life, and as I start to develop this property I do NOT want bindweed killing my plants. It's already completely covered and killed or strangled a number of plants I put in last fall. Nor do I want to have to fight it tooth and nail every year to keep my plants and trees alive. LESS effort, rather than more. I think if I can figure out what purpose it fills I can replace it with other things that fill the same role and it will eventually die out, or at least become less nasty. It may be significant that it doesn't affect the mulberries, the poke, or the wild lettuce. I'm keeping an eye on that possibility.

For poke, I'm replacing it with things that have other uses. I want something that will fill the same or similar role in the eventual forest garden but will also have a use for me. I really don't need 800 pounds of dye at the end of the year, and that appears to be the only real (human) use for the stuff. I'm sure more will come next year, but if I have something else to fill that gap it probably won't be as pervasive.

Trace Oswald wrote:Could you clarify if these plants are growing in your hedgerow, and you want to replace them, or they are growing next to your hedgerow and you want to keep them from intruding, or they are already inside the hedgerow and you want to get rid of them?  

The bindweed is growing in the hedgerow, around it, in the grass, on the trees, on the grapevines. There's one weed that I haven't identified that seems to be keeping it under control in certain areas. Poke isn't a big deal, it's primarily growing at the hedgerow edge, but I want to replace it with something more useful.

I know that getting rid of them entirely is probably not going to work in the long run. I want to replace them with other things that serve the same purpose, so the undesirables are less invasive. I learned a long time ago that if I planted things that filled the same function it stopped the invasives. Planting oats slowed down the grassy spring weeds, cultivated lettuce took the place of the wild lettuce, and so on. Not completely, of course, but it helps.

I can see your point but I was only talking about pokeweed as I have no experience with bindweed, except what I read on the forum.

William says in his signature that he eats it, have you tried it?

I have always been a bit awed by pokeweed; it grows so huge in just one season. It must make truly masterful use of available nutrients. It is pretty, too, so colorful and shiny. I’ve never lived anywhere that it really took over, though.

Anne, I am bindweed curious but so far, I haven't eaten it.
The thread linked to in my signature explores the possibilities,  but doesn't give clear answers.
There is more than one kind of bindweed, and the edible kind isn't even widely eaten as far as I can tell.
Linking to the thread is my way of drawing interest and expertise.

I have read that some homesteaders feed bindweed to their rabbits.
Because of this, I've tried to establish it indoors as a fodder plant, with no luck so far.

Sory, William for the misunderstanding.

I really did think you meant that you were eating bindweed.  I never went to the link as I said I know nothing about it except what I have read on the forum.

I should add a question mark to that link title!