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Here are some replies from an Insta post regarding your question:
Mulch, I am of the opinion that green purslane grows primarily to cover bare soil.
Maybe just build a market for purslane and harvest it! Very nutritious edible. Not a weed!
has the consultant above taken soil and root samples from the rhizosphere of both plants and compared the biology under the scope? Purslane is probably mopping up free sodium in the soil left in the wake of a conventional system, freeing up Mg and K for the soil food web (which will benefit the strawbs) making it more tasty for salads. Leaving it and harvesting it for salad and as a green in a compost might better approach than battling it. Might even make the strawberries taste better, they do have a similar successional profile, so might be hard to have one without the other. It is a very hard thing for a farmer to mentally switch from a reactionary chemical based approach to a proactive ecological one. Tidy fields do not necessarily yield healthy plants.
@thringstagram but like @lukes_thumb_is_green said. You could just pull it all, compost it and serve it back as a mulch. Though purslane could fetch a good price in a salad mix if the logistics of serving it fresh isn’t prohibitive.
@thringstagram that wasn’t exactly why I was suggesting, we’re talking about a commercial strawberry grower so the solution has to be feasible on a large scale. Assuming they are here in Florida, wood chips are super plentiful so the grower could apply a nice layer to the entirety of the field prior to planting the strawberry sets instead of planting in plastic covered hills with bare soil in-between rows. Adding mulch in-between the strawberry rows will be too labor intensive. Or the grower could grow a cover crop in the season before the strawberries go out so the crop residue will cover the soil and the sets can be planted into that. This way the problem is solved while also increasing soil organic matter and supplementing nutritional requirements.
