@alfharris8 My neighbours cat likes to chew on the ground elder... Not sure that is the best idea for her but she isn't the brightest bulb. I tend to stop her if I see her doing it but not sure if it is toxic to cats!
Hmm... Wild garlic and dog wee, nice flavour combination - maybe Jamie Oliver will start touting it as a taste sensation.
Just to add to the controversy...! If it's any help, I had a bad infestation of ground elder - not like yours when you describe the azelea roots I dont think - it wasnt a mat of leaves, just they popped up in between all the other shrubs, but it was everywhere. I used to nip off all the leaves to try and weaken it by depriving it of light, which I did for a year or so. Then I resorted on what re-emerged to the roundup gel. It is very effective indeed but the packaging is pretty dire, so I would paint it on with a paintbrush. I have not eradicated it completely, it pops up every now and then but very very sparsely and this I can deal with. I hope this is some help
Excuse my ignorance but who or what is The OP? Two questions - does continuous decapitation of the tops really weaken it to any effective extent and are there any other plants that will our thug Ground Elder? Not that Implying that is necessarily any better.
In my previous garden I found wild strawberry plants competed very well with GE, it was a south facing slope, rock hard ground and not really much soil.
In my new place, I have tons and tons of GE but it’s a soft woodland soil. It does seem to come out easily. I have no thoughts of getting rid of all of it, im just going to garden in small areas and then expand the areas.
Offering a bit of hope here: I had a bed badly infested with it. Fortunately it was only about 12’ x 6’ and the only plants I wished to keep were three shuttlecock ferns and a big rose. The bed faced North and was shaded making the soil nicely damp and so quite easy to tug out the strings of roots.
Using a hand fork much more than a garden fork and never having to dig to more than one fork’s depth I managed to get 95% of the stuff out in the first season.
The next season it was quite easy to spot and dig out the overlooked bits and I used Round Up in awkward spots, fashioning a kind of protective collar from a soft drinks bottle. I slipped the collar over the ground elder and sprayed inside the plastic. (I use the same technique with a very minor outbreak of bindweed in the vegetable bed).
There used to be periodical stories in the media about bugs being brought in for the intention of eating invasive plants (although not sure Ground Elder a particularly target). I haven't heard about anything like that recently and it always concerned me what the creatures would go on to eat after they had irradiated their initial targets.
Glyphosate does work eventually. I sprayed the ground elder under my ceonothus 3 times and the ground elder has gone. But in the bed next to it I emptied the bed and dug out the ground elder and it has come back. I don't want to do that again and now that the bed is planted I can't spray it. I just keep weeding it.
Dordogne and Norfolk. Clay in Dordogne, sandy in Norfolk.
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Hmm... Wild garlic and dog wee, nice flavour combination - maybe Jamie Oliver will start touting it as a taste sensation.
Two questions - does continuous decapitation of the tops really weaken it to any effective extent and are there any other plants that will our thug Ground Elder? Not that Implying that is necessarily any better.
I would say the ground elder is now 99.9% gone.
I haven't heard about anything like that recently and it always concerned me what the creatures would go on to eat after they had irradiated their initial targets.