December 8

Weeding 101: Weed Identification & Removal Guide

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“A weed is a flower growing in the wrong place.”

                                                                       -George Washington Carver.

The What Of Weeds

1What Are Weeds, and How To Identify Them

Some ideas, crisply captured in a handful of words, resolutely refuse to die. In fact, they keep popping back up, no matter what weapons are brought to bear against them. Like weeds. 

George Washington Carver’s notion that weeds are simply flowers where we as gardeners don’t want them to be has been restated independently by a whole host of other writers since Carver’s death.

The idea of weeds as just flowers growing in the wrong place has become so simply and fundamentally entrenched in the way they’re seen that even Merriam-Webster now defines a weed as “1a(1): a plant that is not valued where it is growing and is usually of vigorous growth,” though it does have the gardening grace to add a sub-definition of “especially: one that tends to overgrow or choke out more desirable plants.”

Easy Weeding – Tip #1 – Before You Hoe It, Go and Mow It
Before weeding your lawn, mow it. It will help you get a better view of the issue you have, and be less damaging to the lawn when you correct it.

Order Vs Chaos

It’s important to understand that there are two types of people in the world. Race, creed, color, class – none of that matters when it comes to weeding. No, in this world there are Gardeners, and there are Naturalists.

Naturalists embrace the chaos of a world and a garden left to its own devices. They appreciate the organic chaos of the competition for resources between plants and see untamed nature as more beautiful than the tamed version.

Gardeners represent the forces of order. Gardeners have plans for how their gardens should look.

They have favored flowers, shrubs, areas of lawn, and they have distinct ideas of what should be where. They spend money, time, effort, and backache making sure that the garden in front of them matches the garden in their minds.

If weeds are just flowers in the wrong place, it’s fair to say that a tiger in Times Square would just be a pussycat out of place.

It would be the view of the human in Times Square which would dictate the ‘wrongness’ of that place for a tiger. It is the view of the gardener which dictates that their garden is the wrong place for the weeds. 

Besides, the second half of the Merriam-Webster definition is important too. Weeds frequently have biological advantages over other plants and flowers, chemical weaponry, or growth rates that, left unchecked, can quickly get out of hand.

They can choke out any ecosystem, draining nutrients intended for the plants and flowers you want in your garden. 

Dandelions might look bright when they flower, but the Dandelion Clock, the ball of snowflake-like seeds on their organic parachutes means one dandelion today could be a hundred next year.

A thousand the next, and before you know where you are, you don’t have a garden but a dandelion orchard. 

Weeds are often out of place because if they get established, they can quickly overwhelm everything else in the garden – often including the gardener!

Easy Weeding – Tip #2 – Get the soil moist before you weed
Preparation is the key. Just like you’d pre-heat a grill before using it, giving the ground a spray before you weed – anything up to a day before – will give the soil a chance to relax. Whether you’re hoeing or forking, it’s go easy once the soil is damp and relaxed.

Double Jeopardy

If a weed is just a flower in the wrong place, then the baseline for spotting them in your garden is the answer to the question: “Did I plant that?” If the answer is no, then you should hear a weed alert klaxon going off in your head. Somehow, you have a weed issue. 

There are two main types of weed though.

  1. Annual Weeds, and
  2. Perennial Weeds.

Annual Weeds:

  1. Grow from seeds
  2. Grow for a single year, then die, but
  3. Usually have lots of seeds, meaning their next generations are a much bigger problem

Perennial Weeds:

  1. Dig in deep roots, and
  2. Survive and grow from year to year, building a thicker, deeper, more complex root system that’s hard to remove

The two types of weeds can exist in your garden simultaneously, but they each take radically different approaches to get rid of. Weeds may be just flowers in the wrong place, but once their life cycle starts rolling in your garden, they can become a gardener’s ongoing nightmare.

There is not really a definitive list of what weeds might trouble you – any viable seed that can get to your soil can begin the infestation. But there are a handful of usual suspects that should put you on Red Weed Alert.

Annual Weeds Perennial Weeds
Annual Nettle Dandelion
Chickweed Field Horsetail
Groundsel Ground Elder
Hairy Bittercress Hedge Bindweed
Shepherd’s Purse Japanese Knotweed

Weeds – The Spotter’s Guide

How would you recognize each of these usual suspects if you spot them nudging up against your azaleas? Let’s take a whirlwind tour of the Dark Side of the Garden.

Annual Weeds

Annual NettleAnnual Nettle

The American stinging nettle is the most common subspecies intemperate North America, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Not only is it common throughout the US and Canada, but it is also one of the most unpleasant species regularly encountered by unsuspecting children.

The Annual Nettle is not the same thingIt’s worse.

Shorter, tighter, with an erect stalk and more tightly packed leaves, the Annual Nettle is technically a rarity and is even endangered.  Approach this tiny Triffid with caution, because its sting is more potent than its bigger, more widespread cousin. 

ChickweedChickweed

If ever there was a weed that looked like butter wouldn’t melt on its stamens, it’s the Chickweed.

It looks like it might easily fill in spaces in a bridal bouquet, with egg-shaped leaves and delicate white flowers with elongated petals.

Looking like nothing more than snowflakes on a green canopy, the danger of this weed is quite how good it is at breeding.

Unless dealt with, it can quickly colonize any flower bed and any garden in which it appears.

GroundselGroundsel

Groundsel is likely to reach your garden from its more natural habitat of field edges or roadside verges through its Dandelion-like seed head.

Flowering almost like a yellow-petaled thistle, again like the Dandelion, it depends on its floating seeds to find new places to take root. If you let it get to that stage in your garden, you can settle in for a long battle with it.

Don’t let it get that far though, especially if you have children or pets, because it’s on the poisonous side when eaten. It contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which are thought to thicken the blood in the veins. 

Hairy BittercressHairy Bittercress

When you see Hairy Bittercress in your garden, or at the edges of your pathways, imagine Mother Nature has pressed a stopwatch. From the moment you see it, you’re in a race against the plant.

It’s not invasive, but it has explosive seed pods, and if it gets that far, then you have yourself an interminable Hairy Bittercress infestation, friend.

Most of the year-round, it looks like a nondescript, low-lying growth of horizontal herb-like green, the kind of thing hot chefs are always discovering has a new and interesting taste. If you see it in fall or winter, look out for green rosette-shaped leaves covering a surprising amount of low-lying ground.

If you see it in spring, look out for small white flowers and slender seed pods. Those seed pods are what will keep you battling Hairy Bittercress year after year if you let them. 

Shepherd’s PurseShepherd’s Purse

Shepherd’s Purse is a poetic name for this prolific seed-spreader. It might be less poetically known as Shepherd’s Backache, because its bladelike leaves lie close to the ground and take longer than you’d imagine to pull up.

The Shepherd’s Purse flower stems are thin and almost woody, sometimes spreading out like power lines off a stanchion.

The flowers are white, forming clusters of triangular, delicate petals.

Like most annual weeds, once the Shepherd’s Purse is empty of all its treasure, you’re going to have backache for years trying to uproot it completely.

Hi, Hoe! Lessons In An Unfamiliar Implement
Never used a long-handled hoe before? It takes a little getting used to. Try our simple guide to the long-handled weed-whacker and you’ll be hoe-ing like a pro before you know it. 

1.       Only use a hoe on annual weds, not perennials. The hoe won’t reach the deeper roots of the perennials.

2.       Aim the hoe at the visible weed. You’re trying to sever the visible part from its root.

3.       Sweep the hoe over the surface, and let the hoe do most of the work for you. The blade is designed for weed-removal.

4.       Don’t overthink it. It’s like taking the tops off carrots, but with a long handle. Pull the hoe over the visible weed, and it should separate from the root.

5.       Practice, practice, practice. The more hoeing you do, the better at it you become, and the more natural it will feel to use an unfamiliar implement to help you make short work of annual weeds.

Perennial Weeds

DandelionDandelion

The Dandelion is the diplomat of the weed world. There’s no-one who will deny its yellow flowers add brightness to a garden. What’s more, its puffball seed-heads are mesmerizing and feel like something out of fairy stories. Don’t be fooled.

Think of it, when you see a handful of bright yellow heads among your grass, as lawn-acne, spoiling the smoothness of the view with its eruptions of color.

And beware the puffball – people, and children, in particular, are prone to help the seeds on their way with a quick blow. That’s the way you guarantee yourself more lawn-acne next year, and the year after that.

Field HorsetailField Horsetail

Fields Horsetail is an archetypal perennial weed. With a bushel of light green spiky leaves, it can extend up to 24 inches tall in any flower bed it infests and looks as much like a green wire brush as it does a horsetail. 

But as with many perennials, what happens out in the open in the less interesting part of the equation. While you’re watching the spiky leaves overtake your flowering plants in beds and borders, underneath the surface of the soil, the roots of Field Horsetail can extend down some 7 feet or more. 

And it’s underground that the Field Horsetail sucks the water and the nutrients meant for your favored flowers, extending itself on a mission of conquest by means of creeping rhizomes. Those creeping rhizomes make it difficult to defeat Field Horsetail once it is established.

Ground ElderGround Elder

The Ground Elder is a weed in herb’s clothing. Named for the similarity of its leaves to those of the Elder, it keeps those leaves close to the ground and seems connected by a network of thin stems.

When it’s ready to actively mess with the life of your garden, it will show small white flowers, but all year round, like the Field Horsetails, subterranean creeping rhizomes are busy establishing its conquest of any bed or lawn. 

If the Dandelion is the weed world’s diplomat, Ground Elder its spy – it will take any opportunity that comes its way to get into your garden, by seed, by burrowing rhizomes from neighboring gardens, or even as rhizome-fragments hiding in the manure you feed your intended plants. 

If it can get to you by extending itself from neighboring gardens, how difficult do you think this spindly, herbaceous invader will be to conquer once it’s established under your soil?

Hedge BindweedHedge Bindweed

Bindweed. Take a moment to consider that word. Bind. Weed. That is not a friendly name. Hedge Bindweed is not a friendly plant. It looks friendly though – its most familiar feature is the pure white trumpet-headed flowers it puts out among hedges, borders, and even next to plant shoots.

It looks like the sort of flower that natty gentlemen in 1920s novels would whimsically put in their buttonhole. The pale flowers of Hedge Bindweed are like the many pale faces of a vampire horde. 

No, really. Don’t be blinded by the pretty flowers of the Hedge Bindweed. It twines around the stems of other flowers and it smothers them, stealing light, stealing nutrients, and thriving while your intended flowers wither. 

What’s more, Hedge Bindweed has a deep and complex rhizome system that makes it a nightmare to get rid of. Crucifixes and holy water won’t save you and your garden from this vampire.

Japanese KnotweedJapanese Knotweed

If Hedge Bindweed gives the game of its negative nature away with its creepy, suburban sap-sucking name, what odds would you give Japanese Knotweed of being a friendly weed that just wants to get along?

Mm-hmm. That’s what we thought.

Oddly then, it’s less dramatically vampiric than the Hedge Bindweed. You’ll find it in beds, on borders, along pathways, and in the winter, it’s a comparatively unassuming plant, dying back to ground level.

We’ve had a diplomat in the weed world. We’ve had a spy. Japanese Knotweed is the assassin in the garden.

Waiting, seemingly sleeping at ground level all the winter through, by early summer its large leaves with their disconcerting purple veining will have shot up on bamboo-like stalks. 

Large, shadow-casting leaves.  When we say the Japanese Knotweed throws shade on every other low-lying plant around, we mean it really throws shade, stopping other flowers from growing as they should. 

What’s more, it grows up to 7ft, becoming a garden variety rainforest canopy, taking all the available sunlight of summer for itself, and leaving a comparative winter for everything else that’s anywhere near it. Deadly as a vegetative crossbow, the Japanese Knotweed will undo all your plans – if you let it survive long enough to fulfill its perennial life cycle.

Weed Removal and Prevention Guides

The When Of Weeds

2 When Is The Best Time To Weed Your Garden

Different weeds will pop up to ruin your garden at different points throughout the year. That’s why the watchword of the gardener is constant vigilance.

Treat your garden as an extension of your body – check it regularly, and check it thoroughly, for things that weren’t there the last time you looked.

If there’s one golden rule of timing when it comes to weeds, it’s Never Let Them Seed.

If you let a Dandelion get all the way to its puffball seed-head stage, Future-You is going to curse Present-You for all the extra weeding they have to do. Weed it immediately, rather than when it’s 7 feet tall.

With weeding, on the one hand, treat your garden as you would your body, and check it regularly. On the other, treat the weeds like Dracula in every competent version of the story.

Rather than attacking him at night, when he’s up and about and supernaturally powerful, wait until the daytime when he’s vulnerable before you attack.

Likewise, with weeds, don’t attack them when they’re ready to seed, or ready to choke off the life-giving sunshine to all the plants and flowers you want to thrive. Tackle them as soon as you spot them – always.

Easy Weeding – Tip #3 – Constant vigilance is your watchword
All a weed needs to get established in your garden is for you not to be watching.

Check regularly. Weed regularly. Know your garden like you know yourself. That way, you’ll spot any newcomers at the earliest opportunity.

The Fightback – The How Of Weeding

3The Best Tools For Weeding

We’ve given you a roll call of some of the most dangerous, prolific, and downright annoying weeds you might encounter. It’s time to fight back.

But how? We know weeds can be deadly, devious, and prolific when it comes to throttling your plants and spoiling your plans. How do we combat their determination to survive?

Welcome to DEFCON Weed!

DEFCON 1 – STARVATION Smother weeds with mulch or plastic, keeping them from the light which feeds them.
DEFCON 2 – SMALL ARMS Dig our weeds with small knives or forks, or cut off flower heads as a short-term solution.
DEFCON 3 – HEAVY WEAPONS Bring in the big guns – long-handled hoes and other tools.
DEFCON 4 – CHEMICAL WEAPONS Better gardening through science – weedkillers and other organic solutions.

 The Gardener’s Arsenal

4The Four Basic Ways of Weeding Your Garden

Weeds will always be with us, either visibly or in anticipation. The well-prepared gardener will be ready when suddenly one morning, there are weeds where there were none before. Stock your arsenal, and de-weed your life and garden at a moment’s notice.

DEFCON 1
Mulch Go green – use organic garbage like fallen leaves, cardboard, wood chips, etc. Lay the mulch over the leaves of your weeds, so that no light can get to them. No light, no food. No food, and soon enough, no weeds.
Plastic Use plastic sheets or bags – the thicker and heavier the better – to achieve the same light-starvation.

Pros:

  • Starvation is a very low-energy way of dealing with weeds
  • You’re likely to have the ingredients of a mulch, or some heavy plastic, already, so it’s minimal outlay

Cons:

  • It can take months of starvation to be certain that you’ve killed off weeds this way – and in the meantime, every time you look at your garden it has Band-Aids of mulch or plastic all over it, which can be unsightly
DEFCON 2 – SMALL ARMS  
Weeding Knife or Hori Hori Essential for getting at the roots of weeds, as if only a little of the root or rhizome is left behind, it can re-grow.
Hand Hoe A small hand hoe can help pull up younger perennials or annuals quickly.
Specialized Tools There are any number of specialized tools, like dedicated Dandelion weeders, which take not only the visible weed but its roots too, in one easy move.

Likewise, there are tools specialized for border-weeding and removing weeds from cracks in pathways.

Secateurs and shears also fall into this category, for cutting the stems, heads or tendrils off weeds to rob them of their food supply.

Pros:

  • Hand tools allow you to get up close and personal, making sure you get the whole root or disconnect the weed from its rhizome net
  • In the case of specialized tools, they do very specific jobs which would be difficult to accomplish efficiently otherwise

Cons: 

  • To use small tools takes a lot of kneeling, bending, and physical exertion 
DEFCON 3 – HEAVY WEAPONS
Long-Handled Hoe A long-handled hoe can pull up some classes of weeds, especially annuals, without the gardener bending to do so.
Weed Burner Generates localized intense heat to burn the weeds while doing minimal damage to the surrounding garden.
Lawnmower Giving lawn-weeding a huge efficiency boost, the lawnmower also minimizes damage to the surrounding lawn.

Pros:

  • Heavy weapons or long-handled tools take some of the physical strain out of dealing with weeds
  • They’re a hands-off solution, while still delivering effective weeding

Cons:

  • The higher the level of technology, the more outlay you’re looking at. So, weed burners are a financial commitment specifically to the business of weedkilling.

 

DEFCON 4 – CHEMICAL WEAPONS  
Softcore Chemistry – Household+ The use of vinegars and suchlike non-poisonous weedkillers limits the damage done to the soil.
Hardcore Chemistry – Poisons Poisons give you relatively certain results, relatively fast.

Pros:

  • An easy solution to at least surface weeds and annual root systems
  • Immediate effect – Apply a chemical treatment and the weeds will likely be gone within a week

Cons:

  • Non-poisons can have limited effectiveness and can be cost-prohibitive
  • Poisons stand a reasonable chance of affecting other, non-weed plants and grasses
  • Poisons can also go into the soil, affecting its balance and productivity
TOOLS OF PREPAREDNESS
Appropriate Clothing Invest in a good pair of gardening gloves before you go 15 rounds with an Annual Nettle. Also, some kneepads are useful for hand-to-leaf combat with the weeds.
Soil Turners You may find you have a need for soil turners – whether those are long-handled forks, small hand-forks or even a trowel, to do minimal damage to the soil and the garden while uncovering the extent of a root or rhizome network.

Now we know the main ways to deal with weeds in general, and we have the tools to do the job, let’s take another look at our usual suspects, and see how we can tackle them specifically, for a weed-free year in the garden.

Annual Weeds

5How To Tackle Annual Weeds

Annual Nettle

The Annual Nettle is like dealing with a viper in plant form. It will require a root-and-leaf approach. You can spray it with vinegar, and that will kill the plant above the surface, but it will take a while, and it won’t affect the root. 

You can try a commercial weedkiller, but the only thing likely to be fully effective is glyphosate. That might give you trouble, because although the EPA certified glyphosate safe for public use, courts have recently overturned the Agency’s ruling. 

The best course, then? On with your gardening gloves and long-sleeved thick gardening shirt. Take a bladed tool like secateurs or shears and cut off the branches or stems of the nettle patch as close to the ground as possible. 

Loosen the earth around the root with either a long-handled fork or a hand-fork, depending on the size of the root. Take a weeding knife or Hori Hori and excavate the root. When you feel it move freely, pull. 

Chickweed

Chickweed is a lot easier to get rid of than many other common weeds. Grab your hoe and start hoeing as if your garden’s life depends on it. Chickweed’s roots are shallow, so a good solid hoeing should pluck them up without too much trouble.

Once you’ve hoed your Chickweed patch, put on your gardening gloves and go back over the spot at close quarters, pulling up any remaining Chickweed you can see. Like pulling hair out of the shower drain, that should be the end of your Chickweed problem – at least, for now.

Groundsel

With Groundsel, you have two options. As with Chickweed, you can either hoe it or pull it up if you see it when it first makes its appearance in your garden. Never underestimate the power of a hoe and a gardening glove, especially when uprooting shallow-rooted annuals. 

Call us crazy, call us extreme, but we’d also go with a hardcore contact weedkiller, applied to the seedlings before they get the chance to flower. 

Hairy Bittercress

How you deal with Hairy Bittercress depends on how extensive its invasion of your garden is. One thing this is not is another job for the hefty gardening glove and a good yank.

Hairy Bittercress will give up its tender shoots to your grasp, while leaving its roots snug – not to say smug – beneath the soil, ready to sprout again the minute your back is turned. 

Get your favorite long, slim weeding tool – its moment has come. You should be able to feel down for the taproot and pull the whole thing up. Take that, Hairy Bittercress!

If your infestation is bigger and more widespread, we’d call in the chemical squad again. You shouldn’t need glyphosate for this job though. Standard weedkiller will do.

Once you’ve dealt with your current Hairy Bittercress emergency, maintain good grass coverage of the lawn. Hairy Bittercress is an opportunistic weed that finds spaces to grow. Fewer spaces – less Hairy Bittercress.

Shepherd’s Purse

A little perspective for you. A single Shepherd’s Purse plant is able to produce an average of 2-3000 seeds each, with three generations per year. That’s an incalculable pain in the butt, not to mention the back, the knees, and the hoeing arm.

If you try to control Shepherd’s Purse with just DEFCON 3 techniques…well, good luck to you, and may all good things come your way.

If you want to do it this way, you need to be ultra-diligent – go back and read those seed numbers again – and you need to regularly hoe your brains out looking for those thousands of seeds.

Any that you miss will become germinators for the next generation, which will be coming your way later this year.

Or you can do what we’d do, and use a contact herbicide to kill the Shepherd’s Purse stone dead as soon as you see it, and before it can get its monumental seed-game on.

Shepherd’s Purse is a case where the odds are genuinely not in your favor. That’s why we’d call in the chemical killers faster than in many other cases. The numbers and the timeframe are against you, and DEFCON 4 is the surest way to win. 

Perennial Weeds

6How To Tackle Perennial Weeds

Dandelion

Dandelions, like Hairy Bittercress, are regenerating weeds. Cut off the head of a Dandelion, snap its connection to its root, and the root will grow a new head quicker than you can sleep twice. The trouble with which is that the root systems of Dandelions can be pretty deep.

There are specialized Dandelion removing tools, but they tend to remove individual dandelion plants, without doing anything to tackle the underlying root, which can keep regrowing dandelion heads like a baby playing Peek-A-Boo, for much longer than your patience will last. 

Get as much of the taproot as you can when you remove individual dandelions.

But without using some fairly hardcore chemical weedkiller that will sink down and shrivel the root system, you’re going to be running the Dandelion gauntlet all season long. Until you realize there are more of them than there used to be. And then they go into seed-head mode, and you’ve lost. 

Game over. Defeated by Dandelions. 

It’s by no means ideal as a weed solution on a lawn but use the hardcore weedkiller. Use it early, and use it as often and as topically as you need, if you don’t want to be outsmarted by a plant.

Field Horsetail

Field Horsetail is among the most difficult of weeds to kill. Rhizomes going 7ft underground mean you’re going to be digging a bunker to get to them the non-chemical way.

You can certainly do that, and grab as much root and rhizome as you can. The more you get, the longer you probably have before that same old weed comes popping up through the soil again.

If you decide to go the non-chemical route, you had best make your mind up to a battle of several years before you can confidently say you no longer have a Field Horsetail problem.

The way to quickly rid yourself of a Field Horsetail problem is brutal but effective. Spray the shoots with weedkiller in summer. Then tread on them, ideally with a heavy gardening boot. You’re aiming to bruise and crush the shoots.

Why? Because then the contact poison of the weedkiller will get from outside to inside, and be pulled down to the roots. As we say, it’s brutal, but it’s how you kill a root system 7ft underground without digging like a fool and failing anyway. 

Ground Elder

Ground Elder is an unusual suspect. It’s likely to have a life elsewhere, as well as in your garden. Completely killing it then is laughably unlikely.

The upside of Ground Elder infestations is that the rhizomes that get it from place to place are relatively close to the surface. This is a job for your long-handled gardening fork.

Like most perennials, it will be able to come back if even a tiny piece of the rhizome remains, but a coordinated effort between you and your neighbor might give you peace from the weed for a longer space of time. 

If Ground Elder has already infested your flower beds, you’re going to play a game called “Clean It Up And Put It Back Again.” – Gently lift all your bedded plants out of the soil and inspect their roots.

Any hint of Ground Elder rhizome, you remove, and then gently re-bed your plants and flowers. 

Yes, that’s going to be a laborious process. Yes, it’s probably going to suck.

But gardening is guardianship, and if you know your plants are compromised by Ground Elder, what kind of guardian would you be if you didn’t do the hard things, just because they were hard?

Hedge Bindweed

Ah, Hedge Bindweed, we meet again. There’s no simple, easy solution to Hedge Bindweed. Its weirdly vampiric nature means you can’t spray it with weedkiller without endangering the plants around it.

You can take the secateurs or shears to it, but that won’t do anything about the rhizomes under the surface. 

Bottom line, on this one, probably the organic approach is best. Vinegar on the leaves to kill the above-ground plant. Boiling water close to the base of the planet, so as to kill as much of the root as possible. 

Will it work? Maybe. Eventually. Will it work in one session, or even one season? Unlikely. 

Persevere. Like Dracula, Hedge Bindweed Must Die. Also like Dracula, it might take a while to get the job done. Switch out the holy water for the hot stuff and you’ll get it done faster.

Japanese Knotweed

If you told Japanese Knotweed to go to Hell…it probably would, just to see the look on your face when it came back next season with postcards from the Lake of Fire. 

It’s a plant so indomitable it makes oceanic plastic look like a lightweight. It grows fast, clumps hard, grows thick annual stems, and grows to 7ft more or less because it can. And its stem growth gets renewed each year from deeply penetrating underground rhizomes. It’s the kind of plant that only Samuel L. Jackson can appropriately describe. 

So how do you kill it?

Well, an AR-15 springs to mind, but let’s be sensible.

Everybody up to and including the EPA recommends using glyphosate on Japanese Knotweed. It’s that much of a problem.

If you’re tackling it yourself, you’re also going to need to get in some good herbal tea and a sack or two of patience, because one season is nowhere near enough to kill Japanese Knotweed, even if you’re using the chemically questionable glyphosate weedkillers.

Bottom line, Japanese Knotweed is Audrey II from The Little Shop Of Horrors. It’s the Triffids from The Day Of The Triffids.

It’s the red weed from The War Of The Worlds. What we’re trying to say is Japanese Knotweed is that point of crossover from a weed problem to the kind of thing that can kill your property value stone dead. 

You can try to tackle that on your own. Absolutely, you can try. And then you can fail. And then you can call in the professionals.

You can probably kiss goodbye to your garden in its current form. You’ll be lucky if the rhizome net doesn’t weaken the foundations of your house. 

We’re trying to say you’re going to need a bigger weedkiller – one who drives up in a truck, probably.

Step away from the Knotweed, back away very quietly, and let the nice professionals do their job. This is less gardening, more a battle for supremacy over the planet. You and your azaleas are not equipped to be a part of this thing.   

Easy Weeding – Tip #4 -Do the whole job, or none at all
Weeds thrive on half-ass weeding. Literally – you cut off a weed’s head and don’t deal with its roots or rhizomes, there’s every chance it’ll be back soon. When you weed, weed all the way, so you minimize weed-recurrence.

Conclusion: Weeds, Be Gone!

9Conclusion Weeds, Be Gone!

The kingdom of plants is just the kingdom of animals, slowed down. There are wars for survival, wars for space, wars for resources happening in the plant world every day and night.

Weeds rarely fight fair. Whether they’re building systems to drain the nutrients from other plants, or growing so tall they block out the sun, weeds are not only flowers in the wrong place.

They’re an existential threat to plants, flowers, and grasses doing no harm and existing in harmony. Gardeners can tip the balance in the war of the weeds.

But it takes constant vigilance, special tools, arcane knowledge – well, more arcane knowledge than a Dandelion has, at least! – and sometimes, bringing chemical weapons to the fight, specifically because the weeds have yet to evolve defenses against complex chemistry.

The garden you want, the garden that’s in your mind, can be yours to enjoy. It can brighten your life, color your memories, and bring you untold pleasure.

But while the weeds are out there – and the weeds are always out there – never expect gardening to be easy.


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