I Have tried salt, Kurtail and lots of others on my allotment and also in my garden but Salt seems to do the trick in my garden but NOT on cultivated soil(for obvious reasons) I have been mildly successfull with kurtail from Pro green.
I have this all over my garden and have decided I will just have to learn to live with this dinosaur of a weed... its easy to pull up when it appears, the only issue is getting rid of it as you cant composte it at home.
My mum , when she wanted a lovely shiny pan pulled a large amount of this weed, bruised it slightly and cleaned her pan with it. I don't know how true this is but also told me it was a plant that survived the stone age - or was it the ice age ? sorry can't remember which exactly. But it made her pans clean and shiny .It was not called horsetail plant by her , it was always called sileca plant.
Horsetail and Marestail are two different plants. Marestail (Hippuris vulgaris) is an unbranched erect perennial classed as a flowering plant found mainly submerged in streams. It bears small pink flowers (male and female separate) that have no petals between June and July. They reproduce by means of a small greenish nut.
Horsetail (Equisetum arvensis) however is classed as a vascular plant that reproduces by means of spores not seed. The plant is toxic to sheep, cattle and horses if eaten green or dried in hay. It thrives in wet meadows and gardens. They are known as 'living fossils' as they are the only survivor of plants living on earth over 100 million years ago. Some as tall as 30 metres.
I have been fighting this for 4 years! Tried a lot of stuff, with limited sucess. It does, however get less invasive if one keeps pulling up fresh erruptions regularly. Thinking of trying SBK. Blairs tip to crush does help! Just been to Harlow Carr whre they've abandoned one of their beds infested with this and have grassed it. For those with in their lawns regular mowing seems to disuade! Good luck!
Ammonium sulphamate can be effective but you have to be aware that it migrates in the soil water and puts the ground out of growing action for all of the growing season.
Mine come from neighbours beds who are never weeded , I've just kept snipping, removing as soon as they're seen , beds are barked now and so far they have stayed at bay .
An old wives tale says you can eradicate this weed by picking it on a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps not as daft as it sounds because you will eventually weeken it even if the roots do go down to the centre of the earth!
The entire area where I live is infested with this weed. 3 years ago I felt despondent as my previous years weeding seemed to increase this beast into a multi-headed monster. I researched this and found this advice. It has worked, but I will always have a problem but one which now takes 15 minutes every month to work at.
Mix a sachet of super strength Glysophate in the recommended amount of water. Once it has dispersed, add wallpaper paste to make a thick paste. Wearing rubber gloves and using a paint brush, apply this mixture to any of the weed that is in full growth, that is, it looks like a large loose bottle brush. You need to make sure each piece is covered from soil up over. Once it is covered, I gently get the frond to stick together and loosely coil it around itself and lay it on the ground. Don't waste time and paste on any shoots that are coming up, it wont have the desired effect.
3 Years ago, the task was monumental, last year much less so and this year its a case of working on any that pops up - and their isn't much of it.
At the start of the season, I mixed up a small plastic tupperware about a 1 pint size of the mixture. I leave it in the potting shed. When I find any of the beast I nip down to the shed and get my "rescue remedy". It works. Even if it pours down with half an hour of pasting it stays put.
Posts
I Have tried salt, Kurtail and lots of others on my allotment and also in my garden but Salt seems to do the trick in my garden but NOT on cultivated soil(for obvious reasons) I have been mildly successfull with kurtail from Pro green.
I have this all over my garden and have decided I will just have to learn to live with this dinosaur of a weed... its easy to pull up when it appears, the only issue is getting rid of it as you cant composte it at home.
Horsetail and Marestail are two different plants. Marestail (Hippuris vulgaris) is an unbranched erect perennial classed as a flowering plant found mainly submerged in streams. It bears small pink flowers (male and female separate) that have no petals between June and July. They reproduce by means of a small greenish nut.
Horsetail (Equisetum arvensis) however is classed as a vascular plant that reproduces by means of spores not seed. The plant is toxic to sheep, cattle and horses if eaten green or dried in hay. It thrives in wet meadows and gardens. They are known as 'living fossils' as they are the only survivor of plants living on earth over 100 million years ago. Some as tall as 30 metres.
I have been fighting this for 4 years! Tried a lot of stuff, with limited sucess. It does, however get less invasive if one keeps pulling up fresh erruptions regularly. Thinking of trying SBK. Blairs tip to crush does help! Just been to Harlow Carr whre they've abandoned one of their beds infested with this and have grassed it. For those with in their lawns regular mowing seems to disuade! Good luck!
An old wives tale says you can eradicate this weed by picking it on a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps not as daft as it sounds because you will eventually weeken it even if the roots do go down to the centre of the earth!
The entire area where I live is infested with this weed. 3 years ago I felt despondent as my previous years weeding seemed to increase this beast into a multi-headed monster. I researched this and found this advice. It has worked, but I will always have a problem but one which now takes 15 minutes every month to work at.
Mix a sachet of super strength Glysophate in the recommended amount of water. Once it has dispersed, add wallpaper paste to make a thick paste. Wearing rubber gloves and using a paint brush, apply this mixture to any of the weed that is in full growth, that is, it looks like a large loose bottle brush. You need to make sure each piece is covered from soil up over. Once it is covered, I gently get the frond to stick together and loosely coil it around itself and lay it on the ground. Don't waste time and paste on any shoots that are coming up, it wont have the desired effect.
3 Years ago, the task was monumental, last year much less so and this year its a case of working on any that pops up - and their isn't much of it.
At the start of the season, I mixed up a small plastic tupperware about a 1 pint size of the mixture. I leave it in the potting shed. When I find any of the beast I nip down to the shed and get my "rescue remedy". It works. Even if it pours down with half an hour of pasting it stays put.
Happy gardening.