Removing vertical cell lines in Table

Hi matplotlib,
I’m trying to emulate the way a pandas table looks in jupyter notebook. So far I’ve used a great stackoverflow answer to get 99% there ( https://stackoverflow.com/a/39358752/3089865 ). The last thing to fix is white vertical lines separating the gray cells! For example:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

df = pd.DataFrame()
df['date'] = ['2016-04-01', '2016-04-02', '2016-04-03', '2015-01-05', '2011-02-06', '2009-02-35']
df['calories'] = [2200, 2100, 1500, 100, 200, 500]
df['sleep hours'] = [8, 7.5, 8.2, 0, -5, -4]
df['gym'] = [True, False, False, False, True, False]

def render_mpl_table(data, col_width=3.0, row_height=0.625, font_size=14, edges='horizontal',
                     header_color='#fff', row_colors=['w', '#eee'], edge_color='w',
                     bbox=[0, 0, 1, 1], header_columns=0,
                     ax=None, **kwargs):
    if ax is None:
        size = (np.array(data.shape[::-1]) + np.array([0, 1])) * np.array([col_width, row_height])
        fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=size)
        ax.axis('off')
    mpl_table = ax.table(cellText=data.values, 
                         bbox=bbox, 
                         colLabels=data.columns,
                         #edges=edges, # !!! Uncomment me !!!
                         **kwargs)
    mpl_table.auto_set_font_size(False)
    mpl_table.set_fontsize(font_size)

    for k, cell in mpl_table._cells.items():
        cell.set_edgecolor(edge_color)
        if k[0] == 0 or k[1] < header_columns:
            cell.set_text_props(weight='bold', color='black')
            cell.set_facecolor(header_color)
        else:
            cell.set_facecolor(row_colors[k[0]%len(row_colors) ])
    return ax.get_figure(), ax

fig,ax = render_mpl_table(df, header_columns=0, col_width=2.0)

plt.plot([0,1],[1-1/(df.shape[0]+1),1-1/(df.shape[0]+1)], c='black', lw=0.5)
plt.xlim(0,1)
plt.ylim(0,1)

As you can see below, this adds white vertical lines between the grey cells. Is there a way to remove these lines altogether? The ‘obvious’ approach is to only set the horizontal edges. But if you try uncommenting the edges kwarg, then the row colours disappear completely.
Thanks for your time!

Screen Shot 2020-12-29 at 11.57.59 pm