Morning glory gone amuck.

Ah! Then you can answer a question for all of us who love our vets:
Isn't it true that vet's go to school longer than physicians for people?

Actually, not usually, but it is much harder to get accepted into vet school than it is to get into medical school! Especially in the west, not enough schools to meet the demand of qualified people. Vets have to go to regular undergrad like everyone else, then go to vet school for 4 more years to get their DVM. At this point, they can go to work and call themselves "doctor." If they want to pursue more education or become a specialist, they can move on to a residency, and they can pursue a masters and/or a PhD, but this route is optional. If your vet is a board certified specialist in anything, then s/he has at least a masters in his/her field. S/he may have done the master's program concurrent with the DVM program, or s/he may have done a 4 year residency following vet school. MD's are required to do a residency before they can practice on humans, but I'm not sure how long it is. At any rate, it is possible to become a veterinarian with a grand total of 7 years of college education (3 undergrad, 4 vet school). MD's cannot do it in 7 years!

My husband's theory is it takes more brains to be a vet because you can't get an answer from an animal but a person can tell you where it hurts.

Good luck. A good vet isn't expensive, he/she is priceless!

I want you to get this sign for your office, someday:

THE DOCTOR WILL BE WITH YOU SHORTLY.
SIT.
STAY.

Pirl that is great! I love it :-)
Yes, the aminals can't explain what is wrong... but the hardest part is being educated in so many different species.

I just got some enlightening information about this bindweed issue. Ron... are you here? Ron has passed along some info to me that suggests that lethal injection to bindweed may not be a permanent solution because of the massive root system. I may only be killing the plant above ground and not getting enough poison to the root system. It may be necessary to use a slower acting method so that plenty of poison gets fully absorbed to teh roots. I'll let him give the detail, but another fellow found that a more permanent solution was to dilute the poison MORE than normal. He snipped the end of the bindweed vine and coiled a bunch of it into a ball and put it into a jar of dilute poison and watched the liquid level go down as the plant absorbed it. If he sprayed ready to use round up on them, the plant died but came back. Using a more dilute solution but forcing it to absorb more of it by soaking made the plant AND roots sick (and dead after a few months). Hmmmm. I think I was wrong! I still stand by lethal injection to blackberries, however, and will continue doing it. I think coiling up thorny vines sounds like a terrible idea! I hope the rumor about blackberry roots going to the center of the earth is false :-) ha ha.
I promise to post later in the season if they come back! I will ask ron to publicly post the message he just sent me. It is enlightening for sure.
Andrea

Ron said I could pass along his email (Thank you Ron!) so I'm copying and pasting below. Needles aren't for everyone...

Hi Andrea,
Thanks for your relpy...;
There is a fellow from England who has posted his method of soaking balls of rolled up vines in containers filled with glyphotase solution and seems to have had very good success with this method,although it does sound somewhat laborious...maybe better than having the bindweed infestation though...an individual choice for each person to decide for themselves...
The person who posted was on the GardenWeb and I will add his posting here:
* Posted by: Bry84 England (My Page) on Sun, Feb 13, 05 at 10:24

I had trouble with bindweed for years, the whole garden was infested with it and nothing would stop it. I pulled it out the first year, but a week later the stuff had grown several foot of new plant. I tried weed killer the next year which slowed it down somewhat, but only for a matter of two weeks rather than one... Gardening is close to impossible when it gets this well established, the massive root system of the plant goes about 15 foot deep and
can throw out endless meters of plant growth all summer. I've seen it scale to the top of a 5 foot fence in just three days. Of all the weeds I've had in my garden, this one is the weed from Hell.

Well, I tried just about everything and looked in to how professional gardeners, farmers and various other industries dealt with the stuff. Disappointingly they accepted in most cases that it could never be fully eradicated. Not the news I wanted so I set out to find my own solution. The main problem with bindweed is the massive deep root network, so if you kill that the result should be good. Glyphosate weed killers (like roundup)
are taken in to the roots of weeds and kill them, so I tried them first and discovered that they didn't have lasting effects on such a large plant. The quantity absorbed by the foliage isn't enough to kill the main root system, it's just too big, and increasing the concentration of glyphosate would cause the foliage to die faster and quickly cut off the absorption. What you need is slow poisoning, that way the plant and it's vast roots will absorb as much glyphosate as possible before it becomes terminal.

I collected the long strands(how long?) of bindweed and wrapped them up in balls(how big?) that I placed inside old jars and tin cans(what size). These I filled with a glyphosate based weed killer, but I mixed it with about 1/3 more water than the instructions suggested, then I covered them over with plastic which I taped down firmly to keep animals and rain out. Do be aware that if these are knocked over and spilt on to plants you want they will die, so it's advisable to keep them at a distance and partly bury them in the ground for stability. It takes time, but I could clearly see the level in the containers reducing as the plant absorbed it. This seemed to work faster in the hot weather as the plant would be drawing more water, and also not removing the new bindweed shoots as
they emerge since their growing is causing the plant to soak up more weedkiller, and also these shoots will be your next place to attach another can of solution when the old ones die off. For the first couple of months I saw no effect, although the bindweed had sucked in several pints of weed killer, but then it started to slow down, and after a while I noticed the new growth was an unhealthy yellow colour with holes in the misshapen leaves. About four months after starting this the main root system must have collapsed as the plant just withered away, even the bindweed across the road died (must have been one huge plant under the garden/road). It did continue to sprout the very occasional sickly yellow shoot, but a quick spray of weedkiller dealt with them nicely.

I dreaded the next year as I thought it would come back just as bad, but actually I only found three or four small clumps of bindweed and they were quickly eradicated with a few more pots of weed killer. The third year I found none. Of course seedlings will be a problem if you have neighbours with it in their garden, but they're a million times easier to deal with than the mature plant. More often than not I've just pulled them out and they never came back.

Wow, there has been quite a lot more interest in this thread than I expected. Had I know I would have stopped by sooner to respond in more detail.

Anyway... I wouldn't wait for the plant to develop better before I treated it. Starting early and being persistent was my method and it worked well. If you just kill the top foliage and not all the roots then, well, don't worry there'll soon be plenty more foliage to stick in weed killer!

As for some of it being extensions of the main plant, I can confirm this with certainty, but you really can't tell what's connected to what and there will be a number of different plants overlapping each other. Since it makes long strands I just gather up as many as possible from a wide area and stick them all in the pots. More pots more strands is certainly better, but you have to limit yourself to some extent as it's very time consuming. I also cut the ends off as I figure a cut end will asorb more. There's no scientific basis to this assumption, I just figured that if you put cut flowers in a vase they suck up the water and live a while, but if you put them in upside down they'd probably die quite fast as water doesn't soak in through the external surfaces very well.

As for my own garden, it's been several years since I did this treatment and the bindweed has never come back like it first did. The first year after doing this I was almost 100% free of it, the second I saw a little that was easily removed. Now, it's been 3 or 4 years and the bindweed is starting to grow again in bigger quantities. A reasonable number of little shoots dotted around the place, they may be seedlings from other big plants which are in neighbour's gardens, or perhaps the main plants from several years back left some roots and they're reviving now. It's very persistent stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if pockets of root that didn't die the first time are comming back now. I intend to spray them with glyphosate, if they're seedlings they should die from this alone. If they don't I'll assume they're from a larger root system, either traveling from neighbour's gardens or left over from my own, and I will get out the cans again.

One other thing I used to have problems with was the lawn, it would grow out of the lawn all over in huge bulging masses. After treating it for several months with combined broadleaf weed killer and lawn feed the bindweed stopped growing out the lawn. Interestingly it would thrive right next to it in the flower beds, but never straying in to the lawn again. These broadleaf weed killers work well, they are long lasting and bond to the soil so they cannot wash out the lawn and damage your other plants, thus with regular treatments the soil for several inches under your lawn stays permanently inhospitable to broadleaf weeds like bindweed. While you might not be aware just how much bindweed is living in and under your lawn as regular mowing chops it off, I'm sure that a large percentage of the root system will be living under the lawn, which is why I suggest anyone who has large problems with bindweed starts their lawn on these chemicals. It's a quick and easy way to damage the root system in a large area. Every time the bindweed tries to grow up though my lawn it hits the treated soil and dies, so it's actively depleating the root system all the time. Some digging to plant a tree in the lawn recently exposed withered bindweed shoots that never made it to the surface.

Now Ron is speaking again:
I have had correspondence with other people experimenting with other methods of bindweed control and regarding the useage of hypodermic needles, I was refferrred to the work of a botanist who has some more extensive experience using this method...perhaps you may want to contact her for some additional information that might be more effective for you and the information is as follows:

"Kim Patten from WSU Cranberry Research Station experimented with hypodermic needles on several weed species a few years ago. From what I remember, the results were mixed and didn't translate well to large(!) scale farming."