Cover Crop Annual Ryegrass – Kill it dead!

By mid-October it was very evident that there was A LOT of volunteer annual ryegrass in this field. At that time the question was whether it would survive the winter...the answer was "yes it would". So now what? KILL IT DEAD this spring!

I was recently in a field of ryegrass cover crop that we had looked at earlier and there is still a lot of ryegrass in the field.  That sounds good, right? It’s unfortunate that it was volunteer annual ryegrass.  This producer had not followed the proper steps to killing his annual ryegrass.

We need to kill the annual ryegrass cover crop in the spring.  Take a look at this site from the Oregon Ryegrass Commission on how to have the best opportunity to kill annual ryegrass cover crops. Now, there are questions brought up occasionally about whether killing volunteer annual ryegrass is more difficult to kill than ryegrass that was planted the previous fall.  I’ll ask the experts to weigh in on that question in the comments section…I do not know the answer to that question!

This beautiful field of cover crop annual ryegrass will need to be killed before planting season.

1 thought on “Cover Crop Annual Ryegrass – Kill it dead!”

  1. Thanks for the link to Oregon Ryegrass Comission. I’m studying cover crops and have been wondering if glyphosate was the only way to kill ryegrass. My concern is that we are already having weed resistance problems, and wouldn’t want to make them worse if going to cover crops.

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top