Kitchen Garden Forum

l have three beds bordering neighbours gardens which have been covered in bindweed of ground elder. It has been impossible to get rid of them, but last year l heard about Mexican Marigolds Tagetes minuta). This is a plant where the rooting system seems to attack the roots of certain other plants which encroach on it. So this year l planted some. Come the middle of the summer, the bindweed was strangling everything around it and the ground elder was doing quite nicely. l pulled out as much of the bind weed as possible but must have left an awful lot of roots behind. The same applied to the ground elder. Couch grass l am able to keep under reasonable control. The marigolds had not grown very much, but they continued to grow very rapidly and are now 6 ft tall. Interestingly, there has been no sign of either bindweed or ground elder reappearing. So it does look asa if the plant is doing the job.
The plant does apparently have some other uses as a herb and the leaves are very aromatic. It doesn't start to flower until the end of October, but they are very small. Fortunately, the chances of them self seeding is very small as in its parent country it is considered to be a weed. Having said that, it actually needs a warm propagator for the seeds to germinate.

Evening Bigal, I tried this many years ago, (actually it was one of my first posts on the forum too) and it was fairly successful...this was on a bed full of ground elder.

I have loads of bind weed, I used to hate it, but it is actually one of the most therapeutic things to dig out, you never win the war but the occasional battle is very satisfying! Probably why I enjoyed clearing the Dahlia & front mixed flower beds on Sunday - not much of a result for anyone looking on, but I was happy! Couch is a bit similar but doesn't give quite as much satisfaction.

Strange person......

Just noticed OH?

Ooh...I've learnt something now....going to order some seeds and plant them in my bindweed jungle next year. I have a large azalea which has an even larger rambling rose in it - it's really hard to get underneath it to dig out the bindweed. Prickly and dense. So, that's going to be next year's experiment. Thank you.

If you don't mind losing the bed for three months, you can apply a compost activator (ammonium sulphamate), which will kill everything green and then break down into nitrogen (and feed the soil!)

We had a major infestation of Horsetail and used AS to great effect; it wiped out everything in one go and only very few plants regrew. It will work on any weed and is especially good on horsetail because the plant thinks it is food, so the silicon covering doesn't deflect it, as would be the case with a standard weed killer.

AS is effectively ammonium sulphate with a tweaked molecule, so isn't weed killer. But you do lose the soil for three months; you know when it is OK to plant again when the weeds come back!