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Bindweed! Can it be battled organically?

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  • LiriodendronLiriodendron Posts: 8,327
    Well, battled definitely - beaten, not so sure... worth a try if you're aiming to use no weedkillers though.  My grandfather, who had an allotment, swore by the "Hoe every Tuesday" maxim.  Aged 7, or thereabouts, I asked what was special about Tuesday...
    Since 2019 I've lived in east Clare, in the west of Ireland.
  • FireFire Posts: 19,081
    edited May 2019
    Lol. The closest I have ever come to a self-induced anurism in my young life, was the year I tried to dig out bindweed by hand. The white, alien roots went over a metre down, under trees, under hedges. My blood pressure couldn't take attempting that ever again. Half a teaspoon of glyphosate gel is, at the point, worth it in my life.
  • wild edgeswild edges Posts: 10,497
    Helix said:
    Has anyone else tried this method for getting rid of bindweed?  Pop a can over every shoot you see.... I find it slightly David Hockney, so doesn’t bug me that bits of the garden are covered in cans.  maybe next year I’ll paint them to look like frogs or something. 

    This is the second year and there’s definitely much, much less.
    What is the can supposed to do? Surely you could just pull out every shoot you see?
    If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
  • josusa47josusa47 Posts: 3,530
    Maybe the plant weakens itself by producing lots of etiolated stems and foliage in the darkness.
  • DovefromaboveDovefromabove Posts: 88,128
    josusa47 said:
    Maybe the plant weakens itself by producing lots of etiolated stems and foliage in the darkness.
    Sounds like an adolescent with a growth spurt. 😉 

    Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.





  • FireFire Posts: 19,081
    If bindweed can happily travel three metres under thick membrane towards light and burrow a metre down, would cans would pose much of a problem?
  • DovefromaboveDovefromabove Posts: 88,128
    We had bindweed grow through a crack in the wall below the DPC and up through the floorboards into our house. It wasn’t even growing towards the light!!! 

    Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.





  • B3B3 Posts: 27,456
    Many poisons are organic. If you mean without using poisons, the only ways are digging, hoeing, blocking light , burning, stopping access to water or drowning if you don't count water as a chemical.
    In London. Keen but lazy.
  • HelixHelix Posts: 631
    edited May 2019
    Yes,Andy Warhol of course.  A senior moment.

    The theory is that the bindweed keeps on growing inside the can as it searches for light, and basically exhausts itself.  If you have a can on every shoot it works...this year I have one area that now has no bindweed and the rest has less.

    If you pull out shoots you often get two new ones, and it’s a lot more work than popping cans on top of them.
  • DovefromaboveDovefromabove Posts: 88,128
    😉 

    Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.





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