What is this weed?

[Bemoremargo]

Please can anyone identify this plant? The shoots have appeared all over the front garden of the house we have just bought! Must be at least 50 sprouted since we first viewed the house a month ago.

Trying to add photos!

Its everywhere!

Field or Common Horsetail.

Very hard to get rid of.

Looks like horsetail. Nightmare to get rid of. Sorry!
Usual info here
www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=257

Argh!!! That's definitely it. Thank you, at least its not Japanese knotweed, but it really is the most hideous plant I've ever seen. Might be why the neighbours have got astro turf! Oh dear.

You need a garden weed burner. Every time one of the blighters sticks its head above ground, zap it.

That sounds fun, would that be instead of weedkiller?

It laughs at weedkiller. You will NEVER get rid of it. I moved into my house 26 years ago, and hadn't realised just how difficult it is to kill. It pops up in all of my flower beds, and I wage war as soon as I see it. I pull up everything I see, but it never gives up, just redoubles its efforts. I think you have to learn to live with it, and control it as much as possible. Or concrete over. ( It will try to come up through that as well).

Urgh - our last garden had that awful stuff. The best you can hope for is to control it. Normal weedkiller doesn't work. Mowing helps. Those weird shoots release spores and they grow really quickly.

Oh and just to make you feel even better about it - the wire like riots can go 3m down!! Bastard stuff.

Sorry OP, it’s a survivor - “Equisetum is a "living fossil", the only living genus of the entire class Equisetopsida, which for over 100 million years was much more diverse and dominated the understory of late Paleozoic forests. Some Equisetopsida were large trees reaching to 30 meters tall” - Wikipedia

I think you can eat it. When you get really hacked off with trying to get rid of it. Fecking awful stuff. In the lawn, mowing controlled it and it preferred poor soil. Our NDNs had an absolute wilderness for a garden, which probably didn't help as it was rampant there.

That's just the spore heads OP - wait until the green spiky bits come up. On the plus side, it's only around for half the year.

Oh dear. 26 years @nanthewiser! Wow. That's dedication. One of the main reasons we are moving is for a bigger garden, I'm terrified in case its in the back garden 🙁. Right, my plan for the front garden is to remove as much of the visible growth as possible and turn it into a rockery, so I can burn the shoots/spiky bits as they appear without ruining a lawn. Does that sound ok? It does look prehistoric @user1469, its hideous.

In the lawn, cut off those spore heads pronto then you'll find mowing regularly will keep it under control. I wouldn't bother with burning them off in the lawn.

It'll pop up between your rockery stones. I'd forgotten just how horrible it is until this thread. You have my sympathy OP.

Don't turn it into a rockery! It will infest it, and be very difficult to control. Burning the tops won't kill it, as it just regenerates from the very deep roots. You just have to keep pulling it as soon as you see new shoots, although that is really only a cosmetic solution - it will always be there. Agree that in the lawn, mowing keeps it at bay, but it soon pops up if not mown regularly.

Thanks both, great advice. No rockery for me then! Would you even bother with weedkiller then? I'd rather avoid it as have children and a very diggy dog.

You can try, but the problem is that weedkiller will only affect the green spiky bits and then only if you have bruised them because they have scales which, iirc, contain silicone so are virtually impenetrable. Some agricultural weedkillers work on it and degrade on contact with the soil. Whether you can get hold of these and whether you can use them domestically is another matter. The root system would have to be completely eradicated to get shot of it permanently. It's like the cockroach of the plant world.

I only use weedkiller where it appears on the patio, I stamp on it first to bruise it (as wowfudge says, it has a protective cuticle which prevents weedkiller penetrating) and spray it. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't. Not really an option in the flower beds unfortunately.

I got rid of it with a lot of work from beds in my last garden
Mixed concentrated glyphosate with premixed wallpaper paste. Bash shoot so can get past waxy cuticle and paint it on with a brush. I did this each evening on all shoots in beds for first year and remarkably few reappeared the next year but treated the same and it eventually went. I truly don't know if I had it in lawn as that kept mowed
I did this method to spikes of it amongst flowers and shrubs - after I'd breached cuticle by bashing or rubbing with a stone, I laid it flat to soil with a stone so weed killer didn't touch anything I wanted to keep
I was really on a mission with this to the extent I even dreamt it was growing out of the back of my head and I couldn't reach with the weed killer 😳

This www.mumsnet.com/Talk/gardening/3229055-horsetail-fighting-a-losing-battle has some useful info .

my neighbour ( I think Polish) said it is eaten at home!

I learnt watching Britain in Bloom that you can also make tea from it, and use it as a dye.
So Yay!

Herbalists use it for all sorts particularly tinctures and teas for varicose veins? You could set up a cottage industry harvesting it in the front garden

My dad won a battle with them using a flame weed burner. Satisfying too. Flaminging them on a very regular basis eventually they are far fewer and easy to zap now.

It's also v useful on patios and for lighting the fire pit is the flamethrower.