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Gardening

Find tips and tricks to make your garden or allotment flourish on our Gardening forum.

Bastarding horse tails!

7 replies

Dillyson · 10/04/2014 13:50

I am declaring war on them.
My front garden is over run with the bloody things. We moved into our house 18 months ago, and the elderly neighbour had a word with us about not composting the horse tails. Before this I had never heard of them.
So now they are cheerfully springing up again, making holes in my drive, the time has come to attempt to deal with them.
I am trying to pull up as many as I can as they appear, and I have super strength glyphosate for later on.
Anyone have any tips for removing them?

OP posts:
Gooner123 · 10/04/2014 21:12

I'm gonna wish you good luck because you are going to need it lol,only advice is to let them get to a decent size before you use the weed killer,and just keep re- applying,if you know any farmers try & get hold of what they use,it won't be available to the general public.
There's a make called resolva that also do a high strength killer,might be worth a try.

echt · 11/04/2014 08:18

You can eat them, apparently, though those with certain medical conditions shouldn't go hog wild. They appear to be chock full of silica, so good for nails and hair.

WynkenBlynkenandNod · 11/04/2014 16:06

I think I read you have to crush them a bit before applying weed killer so it can permeate into the plant properly. It was on my last allotment and is a right PITA so feel your pain.

ElectricalBanana · 11/04/2014 16:09

My husband sprays white spirit on them. Leaves them a couple of days then zaps them with the strongest weed killer

The white spirit breaks down the waxy coating so the weed killer can work.

He has made horsetail his mission....

Dillyson · 11/04/2014 17:52

Thank you for the ideas, Electric, I'm glad I'm not the only one on a mission!
I have a friend who works with the local wildlife trust, so he might have some decent weed death chemicals....

OP posts:
peggyundercrackers · 11/04/2014 18:51

Speak to someone with a poison license, they should have something to deal with them. We had a lot of them when we moved in and just kept digging them out, it took about 4 months to get rid if them completely as we dug them out and dug the ground over, then when they restarted to grow we dug them out again and this pattern followed for 4 months, eventually nothing else grew back. We weren't too fussed with how our garden looked at that point because we were redoing the whole garden and the area they were growing in was being changed to a lawn.

CuttedUpPear · 13/04/2014 22:40

I have them and have given up on ever getting rid of them.
A miner friend of mine said that he used to see the roots hanging down in the tunnels going into the mines, a quarter of a mile underground Shock

I'm putting landscaping fabric down where I can as when you spray them with glyphosate it only knocks them back temporarily.

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