things i learned this year.

They wouldn't consider doing a thing. They have no idea what they're doing when they're outside and chop down things at all the wrong times.

If I have to resort to Round Up you can believe I will do it.

LOL - garden guerrilla tactics!

Its tha only way to go.

Roses, This is Creeping Charlie. This is the spot where the voles leave my side of the house bed and travel across the lawn to my road side bed. I sprayed the vole run to kill the charlie, but the entrance points to both beds require constant hand pulling because of the plants there. Everywhere the voles run, charlie and thistle moves in. Last week, I gave this the hands of death treatment.

What is the thistle you have there?
Its all over the place here, starts in the fall and doesnt stop

Pirl, I would use a Broadleaf spray and not Roundup. Roundup will leave the ground barren and the most virulant weeds will move in. That's what the neighbor did 3 years ago to create the problem. He killed all of the vegetation and left the ground fallow and every invasive weed species moved in. If he had just put grass seed down, we wouldn't have the problem.

Ge, we have 2 kinds of thistle here. I don't remember their names. There's the one you see in the photo and another one, (bull thistle, I think) that gets hugh and resembles the foliage on an echinops, very prickly. I have learned how to kill it, but it's not easy and requires patience.

I have seen bull thistle and the one you have isnt it.
Mine have a little yellow flower.
Mine come from the neighbors black raspberry patch.
You can see it beyond the bear

Ge, I haven't seen the ones with yellow flowers, but then again, I don't let any of them get big enough to flower. The Bull ones, not the one in the photo I posted, have purple flowers here. I looked for a photo of the Bull thistle, but I must have deleted it. But there is a photo of it in this thread:

http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/926080/

This message was edited Nov 15, 2009 10:55 AM

BullT's are wild here and grow in abandoned fields theyre awful

Yes, That's the problem. There is an unmowed field across the street and the Thistle and Burdock Articum come in from over there.

groaan

That's the problem we have in the country that a lot of city people don't have. We are surrounded by fields and woods. So tons of weed seeds all the time.

Your garden is filling in so nicely, Jo Ann.

Thanks Polly
you can take some of the credit.

Yes, Polly is always very helpful. So many nice folks here on Dg.

I don't even live out in the country, although the fields across the street were the country 30 years ago. But there are lots of woods here and a few open pieces of unattended ground, just waiting for a developer to scoop them up.

Ge is your development in a rural area?

This was farmland around a small village on the outskirts of a city with population of 250,000.
Its been developed for the past 30 years .

Stormy,

I have that creeping charlie!! What is the ground cover looking weed that is on the ground to the right of the Black Cherry rose bush in this picture?? It grows all over, even in pots. Sometimes I pull it and sometimes I leave it as a ground cover, but I don't know where it comes from.

Terry, Roses truly are red!! I don't know. You could post it on the ID forum or put it on the bloom thread in MA & ask Claypa or Sally to look at it. They know all of the weeds. A closer photo would be good. I'm sure the birds are planting it.

I could be wrong, but it looks like portulaca to me. Are the leaves fleshy?

Hey Sheryl! I get a lot of that wild Portulaca growing in my front shrub bed. One plant can spread almost 24 inches.

This message was edited Nov 17, 2009 6:30 AM

Its a mess here,but easy to pull

I'm not sure that's what is growing under Terry's rose bush. Of course, your eyes might be a lot better than mine.

I copied the photo, cropped it and blew it up and I do think it's that wild weedy portulaca. It has another name but my husband is asleep right now and he's the one who knows the name.

It is portulaca. I clicked on the picture, held down the CTL key and hit the plus sign over on the numbers keypad until I had it enlarged to 225% and yeah, it is that weed. It has to be killed before it seeds or you will fight it forever... Thick mulch helps.


Oh yeah, after you look at the picture, you have to hold the CTL key down and hit the minus sign until it is back to only 100% (% sign is over there in the bottom right hand corner above the clock)

That's good, Pirl. The wild shamrocks drive me crazy. They can take over in no time. Nutsedge too.

Thanks, JuneyBug. I'll try that.

Wow, That worked great!

nutsedge is the worst. Once it gets into your lawn you cant get rid of it.

I don't notice it so much in the lawn, but I have one bed that it shows up in. I use "Sedgehammer" on it. It kills it right away, but it will pop up again about a month later. Maybe, I'm not really ever getting it all.

Its horrible that way.
My old house was in a neighborhood where houses were a driveway apart.
Neighbor tried to hand weed it out because she had a philosophical avarsion to pesticides and weed killers.
It kept jumping the fence so I used RoundUp.
She freaked out but too bad. She was also a hoarder and had a dump both in front and in back.
She was a sweet woman altho a bit excentrick

Juney - thanks for a very easy way of enlarging a photo. Far easier than what I did, which I thought was quick and easy, but your way is so much faster.

Hate that nutsedge!

I don't even know where I learned how to enlarge like that - probably here at Dave's!

I really have to agree that the nutsedge is the worst. I fought it for 10 years and didn't quite get rid of it. It somehow got into the daylilies and I could never get it all killed.

That's the good thing about using the "Sedgehammer". You can get the spray on other plants and it doesn't harm them at all. I can see that if it's roots get entwined with the Daylily roots, you would have it forever.

What other weeds will it kill, I have that strangle vine in my Jap Iris

Ge, I think that it only works on Sedges. I get a lot of problem vines, but don't know what strangle vine is. I get Solanum and wild grape and wild roses and wild raspberries. There are a couple of unknown vines here too. When I first moved here, I pulled 80' long Kudzu out of the trees. I cleared a lot of Honeysuckle out too. For three years, I did vine patrol daily. Now it's not really much of a problem at all.

Jo Ann - the vine with purple berries? If so, that's the Porcelain vine and a big problem to us in the past. I spent an entire month, 5 to 8 hours a day, removing that and ivy along over 100' along the property line. Now I always check to be sure none of either of those are growing back again.

Someone explained here at DG (I think) that nut sedge is a perennial, not a grass, so the Sedgehammer would work but regular grass killers won't do the job.

Pirl, Yukk! I've never had that Porcelaine vine, but at my last garden I had a hugh patch of Ivy to remove. I recall it taking forever. For the first three years that I was here, my morning garden stroll always included spraying woody weed killer on the emerging Kudzu. So many new ones would show up every day over a hugh area. That's why I never planted any ornamental vines until that white fence went up. I was vineaphobic!!

The Solanum that I get also has purple berries:

http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/showimage/45446/

I didn't know kudzu was into Pa, I thought it was a southern thing. I hope it's not hardy here.

Polly, It's deciduous here, but it is destroying all of the trees along the roads and highways. The electric and phone companies are having the devil of a time with it on their poles and towers. I'm not sure how far north it has gotten. I don't remember seeing much of it in the Poconos.