Permanent, undisturbed, in-row living mulch: A realistic option to replace glyphosate-dominated chemical weed control in intensive pear orchards

Abstract

The preservation of biodiversity and the improvement of soil fertility have become important goals in orchard management; therefore, the standard approach of weed control in the understory of tree rows by repeated frequent use of herbicides needs to be replaced by more sustainable methods. This study presents a technique for establishing a permanent autoregulatory non-competitive plant community as an alternative to herbicide treatment. For a practical demonstration of this weed control method, an experiment was conducted in a pear orchard during the 2015–2019 growing seasons. A permanent plant community was created in a 1 m wide strip under the trees by seeding three different grass and herb mixtures. Two types of control plots were also established (weed control treated with the herbicide glyphosate and weedy control). Several inventories of the species composition of the studied communities were conducted each season. The relationship between the proportions of plant biomass of native, non-seeded plants, and seeded plants was evaluated. The results of this experiment show that the long-term undisturbed development of understory communities not exposed to herbicides or mechanical weed control causes only a limited, statistically non-significant reduction in yield.