Dealing with Yellow oxalis in my thyme?

The ground cover throughout my hillside yard consists of wooly thyme and some red thyme. Yellow oxalis is once again making its appearance and as the thyme grows thicker each year...it is increasingly difficult...and an apparent losing cause...to try to get at the oxalis roots to get it out.

Is there anything else I should do to deal with this? Any suggestions would be welcomed.

Thanks

 

The possibility of indefinitely extended meticulous hand-weeding is a drawback to planting extensive areas of creeping thyme. I once worked for a short time in a garden where I was expected to weed tiny sedges out of a carpet of thyme with a dinner fork. You can do likewise there in the hope that the thyme eventually wins out (or use spot treatments of appropriate herbicide) or give up and replace thyme with a taller groundcover that does not allow as many weeds to come through. Salal and Pfitzer juniper are examples of covering plants tall enough to exclude most (but not all) weeds once established and filled in. What, exactly, transpires in a given planting always varies with particular site conditions--perhaps unpredictably. Where I worked the implication was that it was really too damp, as the weeds coming through were moisture-loving. Yet the drought-loving thryme was also growing satisfactorily.

 

Ron: Thanks for that...I will try and stay with the thyme for now...it does (usually) look great. Any suggestions as to appropriate herbicides? I did try "dabbing" Roundup carefully on the oxalis leaves last year, but in many spots it seemed to cross over (?) at the roots and take out patches of the thyme.

Barrie