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Fennel as a Cover Crop

 
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Just about every gardening book I've read says that fennel does not grow well with other plants since it has strong allelopathic properties. I've even found a few journal articles that have studied the allelopathy of compounds found in fennel juice. Here's one such article:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283712660_Allelopathic_Potential_of_Fennel_Foeniculum_vulgare_Mill

This allelopathy now has me wondering if the plant can make a good cover crop to kill or stunt weeds if the plants are chopped up before they go to seed. The only concern I have is that the seed of this plant may be more difficult to harvest in bulk compared with more traditional cover crops. I hope there's at least one member on this Permies forum who's experimented with using fennel as a cover crop. I'd like to find out what results anyone has gotten with this plant.
 
Ryan M Miller
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I just learned that another drawback to using fennel as a cover crop is that the plant is a perennial and not an annual. This may cause problems when it comes time to chop up the plants into the soil, especially if it can clone itself from root fragments like dandelions or creeping thistle. I'll do some more reading.
 
Ryan M Miller
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I've done further reading and it appears that fennel does in fact spread from root fragments thus negating any benefits this plant may have as a cover crop. Looks like I'll stick with cereal rye to smother weeds.
 
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Ryan M Miller wrote:I just learned that another drawback to using fennel as a cover crop is that the plant is a perennial and not an annual. This may cause problems when it comes time to chop up the plants into the soil, especially if it can clone itself from root fragments like dandelions or creeping thistle. I'll do some more reading.



If you ever pasture crop things like pumpkins, wheat, oats, fodder beats.  PAsture cropping is where you double graze hard in an area then no till drill a normal seed mix. Ie okra, pumpkins, wheat, peas, sainfoin, alfalfa, sunflowers. So forth then you crop those like you are cropping a normal crop and you can sell it in market. If it's pumps and you want it to look pretty you can actually walk your pasture and spread a lil bit of cardboard boxes under plans and then some woodchips on top of the boxes to help it along. But honestly grows fine without it. You can also feed it off directly to live stock but certain crops we found we can take it to market depending on how many days it's been since livestock has been in the field. Certain crops are just too short to turn around and try and sell it. You could treat Fennel as a high value pasture crop like we do sainfoin and alfalfa. It would probably be a great crop for a pasture that sees a lot of rabbits and quail.
 
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Interesting. I've only read the first page, but i'm, not that impressed. My experience is seeds get carried off by birds and dropped ones germinate elsewhere. Even in grass , which is quite a feature as that doesn't like the competition either. I covercrop with dutch white clover and have the idea it's rather alleopathic too. I've noticed seeds dropped in covered bits pop up less then when i took it out. Do you know spmething about that?
 
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