Help me with my bindweed

[hopingtochangeeachtime]

Ok I have bindweed everywhere and I have weeded and covered the beds and when I uncover it's popped up again in anaemic looking plants and roots. How can I get rid of it? It grows up the sides of any covered beds and has spread to everything that isn't grass. My neighbour has it but it's rented so they don't do garden care.

Here's a pic

Weed killer on the leaves and let the plants take it down to the roots. We have a small amount of it in a bed I've renovated and even the tiniest bit has a massive root system which snaps of you don't carefully dig it out. It needs the big guns to get shot of it.

I hate using weedkiller but it's the only thing that works with bindweed.

Use a paint brush to paint glyphosate weedkiller on the leaves and stems. The alternative is to cut the bottom off a 2 litre plastic bottle, put the stems in that and then spray them with weed killer.

You’ll never dig it out. The roots go really deep and you only have to snap it and leave a tiny bit of root in the soil for it to regrow.

I had some in my garden and weed killer wasn’t doing much so I dug up the entire area, bagged up the soil and roots and took to the tip (about 35-40 bags). I then put weed killer on the ground to get what was left, and left the soil uncovered, then put weed killer on every couple of weeks and when I saw any shoots come through. Did this for a whole summer/autumn and left it over winter and thankfully it seems to have finally gone. In spring I put down a weed membrane then covered with soil and then planted up. It’s not an easy fix sadly, good luck!

I have lots of bindweed on my allotment. I can't use weed killer as we are growing fruit and vegetables organically. I follow this gardener's advice and seem to be getting on top of the problem.
charlesdowding.co.uk/dealing-with-bindweed-the-long-haul-and-mulch-reduces-the-work/

Digging it out seems to reduce it massively. The beds in my back garden were virtually covered in bindweed, ivy and a few brambles (for added interest lol).

Last summer, I ripped them all out and dug them over. With the bindweed, I pulled out every root I saw (they're easy to identify, sort of fat looking and pale coloured).

I dug it all over again earlier in the year, and removed out more bindweed roots before planting. Some has sprouted since, so if it's accessible, I get out as much of the root as I can with a trowel or spade.

Where it's too near other plants to do that, I pop a plastic bag over it and spray it with Roundup while it's in the bag (the plastic bag stops the Roundup getting on other plants). It seems to be working so far.

I've poured some spray on weed killer in with water in my old watering can and poured over some of the beds without plants ( like the one in the picture) The others I can't as have things I don't want to kill. I had attempted spraying some of the plants previously, but the smell took my breath away and there so much my hand was aching. Hoping it might do something. It did work to wilt some plants when I sprayed it but literally the next day more had popped up.

Thanks for the links and tips, I will keep snapping off new growth and try to remove as many roots as possible. I'll report back again in about 3 years 😬🤣

Weed killer needs to go onto leaves afaik for the plant to take it in.

@WeAreTheHeroes

Weed killer needs to go onto leaves afaik for the plant to take it in.

@WeAreTheHeroes you are probably right, just giving it a quick go to use up the spray I had. There aren't that many leaves as the beds have been covered, just little tiny plants popping up everywhere on a daily basis, which I mainly have been hoeing/ snapping off and removing to bag up rather than compost.

I can't tolerate the smell of the weed killer, maybe I can find a different one.

Wear a mask and use a pressurised spray so you are as far away from the spray as you can be.

In February I dug out a load of plants which were unremarkable, but huge and taking over. You couldn't even see where the bindweed was growing from before. I've planted things I like instead. Unfortunately there are now areas of bare soil and I'm having to weed far more than before. I've planted several different ground cover plants to combat this.

How long are you covering for? Mulch with cardboard and leave down for a year, top up with another layer of cardboard if needed.

If it comes up in amongst your planting stick beanpoles in to encourage it to climb then put disposable gloves on, spray round up on the gloves and rub up and down the bindweed that is wrapped around the beanpole.

Not bindwind - but I had some brambles that just would not die, so i made a smallish hole in a jam jar lid and filled the jam jar with about an inch of SBK and fed 3 stems through the hole, screwed the lid back on with the stems in the fluid and left them for a few weeks and that seems to have worked.

So could doing something like that be an option?

@RIPwalter I have beds that have been covered all winter in plastic ( non porous ) , a few I weeded two months ago and covered, but of course this is prime bindweed season. It pops up everywhere literally in my plants, veggies and flowed , one shoot every inch along the edges of the beds 🌱 It doesn't seem to make a difference how long they've been covered, I think I will give up with the plastic, maybe I will try cardboard instead or just weed all year around and daily at the moment ha ha. Honestly loads have grown up since yesterday's weeding. It's amazing, bindweed is my nemesis.

@Furball what is SBK ? I'm a bit scared to let it grow big, it's zillions of tiny ones at the moment covering everywhere.

I haven't got rid but I do seem to have it under control. Each spring I pull out as much as I can, fully accepting that I haven't actually got it out, but at least things look tidy. Then through the season I paint leaves with weed killer, using a children's paint brush, as soon as they appear.

Each year there's less to deal with in the Spring.

@hopingtochangeeachtime - SBK is a type of weedkiller

ok, so covering beds overwinter doesn't help as bindweed is dormant in the winter.

I have it in several places.
I have dug the beds over and sieved the soil. Get every root.
Once you have done that, then you have broken the back of it. When you do that you will find a lot of roots and removing them all really does help.

Then you can remove every single bit as it grows. Even bindweed can't survive having no leaves. So it will go.

If it is coming through form next door that is harder.

I had a bindweed problem in my garden. I spent ages digging it out, and I mean going down 18 inches or more to get literally all of the rhizome out. Eventually it stopped coming through and I planted some stuff there, but after a few months I did start getting the odd bit re-appearing.

I got some concentrated stump killer (glyphosate) and used that on any emergent bits, neat. That was the end of it! Been bindweed free for a few years now.

In summary - dig out what you can, really deep. Weedkiller what you can't.

I second the sieving!
When we moved and renovated, the plot hadn't been ‘gardened’ to any extent for about 20 years. Under some very old plastic membranes were mats of bindweed roots, though they were relatively straightforward to deal with. The stuff that popped up all over the garden was harder; we dug out as much soil as we could and sieved it to remove all the bits of root. Now we only get it round the boundaries, coming in from other properties. I just pull it out, after rain you can often get long lengths out.

You all know I'll be sieving this bank holiday don't cha 😬😂

There aren't that many leaves as the beds have been covered, just little tiny plants popping up everywhere on a daily basis, which I mainly have been hoeing/ snapping off and removing to bag up rather than compost

Don’t snap off the stems. As a pp has suggested what you need to do is kill the roots. Or it will forever come back. To do that you need the plant to take the weed killer back to the roots (honestly this sounds like the plot of a disaster movie doesn’t it). You need to encourage foliage first before you can kill the plant.

Push bamboos into your flower beds and train the bindweed up the sticks. When you have a good amount wound around & around with LOTS of foliage, then you spray. Then you leave the the stick and th foliage for at least a few weeks. The plant takes all the weed killer back to its roots, killing the whole plant not just the foliage that you can see above ground. This works particularly well in the autumn when the plant is naturally drawing nutrients back to its roots.

@Daisydoesnt the thing is there are so many plants popping up will they all go up one cane within an area ? Otherwise I'll have a whole fence across my flower bed if I stick in a cane next to each sprout. I'm happy to try to try to dig and remove it from empty beds, but letting it grow seems wrong. I'm sure it is a super plant that doesn't need leaves of light to grow.

Once they start growing you can guide them to a cane and encourage them up, so you can have several growing up one cane. So you don't need a cane for every weed! Then you can apply glyphosate (roundup). I waited until I had a couple of feet of growth, removed the cane and stuffed the weed growth into a plastic bag without breaking the stems, then sprayed into the bag and tied it shut. But to be honest, I think a garden fork and a sieve is what you need to do first. Happy sieving!

We had our builders trained to shout ‘white root!’ whenever they spotted bindweed. They were very good about removing it. The build involved a lot of moving soil around the plot.