Missouri Whitetails - Your Missouri Hunting Resource banner

Grass ID

3.3K views 21 replies 12 participants last post by  Maddog3355  
#1 ·
Is this little blue stem ?
Have quite a bit of it spreading around.
 

Attachments

#4 ·
Prime indicator of poor soil. Needs lime.
 
#7 ·
Add lime as per soil test and it will go away. Fertilizer wouldn't hurt either.
 
#8 ·
It’s not an invasive. It’s been growing in poor MO soils forever. Strips along a field edge is awesome bugging habitat for turkey poults. Tall which offers protection from avian predators and shade and it grows in clumps so there is plenty of open understory. Given the choice between it and fescue or other truly invasive species I’ll take it every day of the week.
From my experience where it grows and thrives there is no business to even attempt to put in a food plot.
 
#13 ·
It’s not an invasive. It’s been growing in poor MO soils forever. Strips along a field edge is awesome bugging habitat for turkey poults. Tall which offers protection from avian predators and shade and it grows in clumps so there is plenty of open understory. Given the choice between it and fescue or other truly invasive species I’ll take it every day of the week.
From my experience where it grows and thrives there is no business to even attempt to put in a food plot.
are u positive its not invasive?
 
#9 ·
I'm trying to remember if that's what Dad called "poor John" or if that was ragweed. Regardless of what it's called, it has zero food value, nothing I know of will eat it. I have a neighbor who baled up about 12 acres of it a few weeks ago....and there was nothing underneath it to speak of. From what I've seen since he bought that place, he has much to learn.
 
#14 ·
To my knowledge it isn't an invasive as in a foreign, introduced grass. When I took the Master Naturalist course we covered grasses and I'm pretty sure broomsedge is just another warm season, native grass. It's just that for other than cover, it's about worthless. It's invasive in that it likes poor soils and wherever they exist, you more than likely will have it. Where I am, the Ozarks abound in poor soils so we have plenty.
 
#20 · (Edited)
100% native to MO and most of the US just west of and all of east of the Mississippi River. It is very closely related to big bluestem and little bluestem. Never quite understood why it got such a bad reputation. From my experience it is and always was the NWSG of the MIssouri and Arkansas Ozarks and there has always been way more of it than big blue, little blue, Indian grass, gamma oats, etc. It acts the exact same way as the fashionable NWSGs in a lot less desirable soils. Controls erosion, high canopy, open understory, allows other beneficial natives like partridge pea and ragweed to backfill within a stand of it, etc.

I could name off about 25 weeds, grasses and plants that were introduced in the name of wildlife habitat that are invasive and way worse to have than broom sedge.

On a side note, back when there was quail in the Ozarks you absolutely couldn’t beat a field of broom sedge.