Invasive plant in my garden: Bishop weed

I recently move to a new house, surrounded by a beautiful garden with a big problem. All the beds are cover with Bishop Weed, I tried to remove them but each time it´s worse. I spend to many hours cleaning the soil from deeps roots but it´s never enough. This plant grew under the soil in the last season.nI love plants but this invasive plant needs to go.
What can I do to clean my garden?

 

From what I'm reading, it sounds like a hopeless task. "Learn to love it" seems to be popular advice. At least you need to be sure to cut off the flower heads.

I did read one interesting positive bit of advice, on the Oct 9, 2010 comment on a blog page of someone named Hanna, the Oct 9, 2010 posting.

Tagetes has some uses (see Wikipedia), but it doesn't look that attractive. I have no idea what its habits are.

 

Round up or vinegar...

 

Patience & a lot of hand-pulling. There really is no substitute for hands & knees & trowel for weeds in the garden for this guy....Oh, and vinegar & a blowtorch as well. Roundup? For me this is a last resort & I use it as a topical application on individual stems only....Oh, to be strictly honest I did spray the neighbours #$%@# English Ivy that comes through a chainlink fence, as well last year...Grr!

Nearly all the nasty weeds in the SW BC gardens can't tolerate mowing, with the obvious exceptions. I have, on several occasions put beds or sections thereof back to rough lawn for a couple of years before re-establishing them. Seems to work.

 

I recommend sheet mulching as it saves a lot of labour and disturbs the soil the least. Put down newspaper or cardboard with lots of overlap over the goutweed and then put mulch on top to make it look nicer. Basically you are composting in place. You might have to keep doing this every year for a while, but it will really set it back. If you have other perennials in the beds, it will be nearly impossible to get the goutweed out of the roots, but you can dig them up and wash them off and try to get rid of the goutweed stolons. Good Luck. Death to Aegopodium!!!

Laura Ralph
Alive and Well Organic Gardening
www.aliveandwellorganic.ca

 

Another possibility is to use black plastic as your bed cover and simply solarize the beds for a summer - the high heat generated underneath the black plastic will fry all of the roots and bits.

 

Sun? Summer? Wot's that? SW BC is skipping that season this year. Black plastic is merely a large umbrella for plants in 2011.

 

Eek, you guys are in the same boat as I am? That's depressing. I haven't seen the sun here in two weeks, and it's getting icky - it will be the first time that my mountain city (built on sandstone cliffs) has flooded if it keeps up for another week.

 

One bit of advice I read was to buy The Garden Claw or similar cultivating tool to wrest the plants and their roots from the soil--and persist! We inherited Campanula rapunculoides 30 years ago and know we will always have it despite efforts to get rid of it. Same goes for you and your Aegopodium.

 

Thank you for all your comments. I still digging the roots trying to keep this weed under control, but my garden is too big for working by myself and when I finish one part, the last one is cover with bishop weed again :(
It is sad because I have many beautiful Clematis sp. and Lilium sp. sharing space with this invasive and I don't want to damage them. Two months ago I clean a bed under a Rhododendrum and after I covered with mulch but the bishop weed grow more stronge than before.......
I am from a tropical part of Mexico, and I never experience this kind of problem before...
Thank you again. I will let you know how is everythin after all...
one more question....Can vinegar damage other plants?
Enjoy your summer!!

 

Vinegar kills the soft green leafy parts of a plant that it comes into contact with. So if you spray it on some leaves of other plants as well as the bishops Weed, it will "acid burn" them too. If it is the kind of plant that sends up new growth from underground stems like Aegopogon, you will have to go back & spray again until you exhaust the plant's ability to regrow. Vinegar will not absorb into the plant & move through the plant (translocate) to kill the parts that were not sprayed.

I expect that you have figured out that the vinegar you need is the 10% Acetic Acid sold as pickling or cleaning vinegar. Repeated application would tend to increase the acidity of the soil. I do not believe that this has ever been an issue for me with the amounts of vinegar used in spraying my weeds. I tend to rake up the dead material & put it on a compost heap. I take pH readings sometimes on my compost & have never noticed it to be substantially more or less acid (runs between 6.6 & 6.8).

Keep up the work with the Aegopogon. you will get it under control. If you have a large area, just keep using a weedeater or mower on it - you can exhaust the plant in in the open areas & clean up the corners with Vinegar or some other weedkiller.

...if you get fed up with spraying the plants, you can always take a break & spray some vinegar on your french fries in true Canadian fashion!