Ground Elder Help!

[Tissy]

Does anyone have any tips for getting rid of ground elder? I have an infestation in my two front flower beds, and have spent the past two weekends trying to dig it out. I know I'll have left loads of roots, but don't really want to dig up the other plants as well!

Do these weedkillers you see on the TV work (Weedol?). They're supposed to get through the leaves to the root.

DH has suggested concrete!

Make the concrete at least 6 inches thick and reinforce with steel, may work!

Sympathies - we have it all over our garden and we just resort to digging it up. You have to make sure you get rid of the roots or else they will come back.

Tissy, have asked dh about this (self-employed gardener) and he agrees that it is a bugger to get rid of and you need to dig out as much as you can with a fork rather than a spade because any chopped roots left behind will grow into a new plant. Then use a glyphosate (Weedol is one) weedkiller which will draw from the leaf down to the root and kill the whole plant. Don't let it splash on other things because they will also die. Also, don't use on a really sunny day because it will work too quickly on the leaves and not get through to the roots.
HTH

use a small fork if you can and dig out individual ground elder...have spent some time in a garden pulling very small areas out of this...as long as you get all the roots out, (digging deep enough you don't need to use any sprays), it won't come back....Make sure you get the long root under the ground that links all the other ground elders...if quite deep rooted use a slade and dig deep....good luck

You can get Glyphosphate which is in brush-on gel form - easier to apply accurately and less chance of laying bare surrounding vegetation. It does work, I dug and poisoned a HUGE area from my Mum's garden.

We have a similar problem with bindweed - anyone know if the same treatment will work??

gingerbear - have loads of bindweed at the back of my garden. Was advised to try the brush on Round Up for that - will NEVER be able to dig it out.

gingerbear, I think that Ground Elder and Bindweed are the same thing!

Good luck!!

The bad news is that it will be a combination of hard work and glysophate weedkiller - and it will still take a few years to get totally on top of it.

I was pregnant the first spring we were in our new house - and had to attack a LARGE border (about 15m long and 4m wide!)that the previous owner hadn't touched for 6 years. It was INFESTED - yet it still had lots of good plants in it too.

I soon decided that the best approach was the m hardest work one - ie DIGGING out the ground elder - as I'd never have been able to spot weed such a large area. I was literally sifting the soil with my fingers, trying to get all the roots out - and trying to follw the roots of one plant along underground to the next one.

Fortunately, where I am in Scotland I have both a very rich soil plus it's never too dry (), so if a ground elder root were too entangled in the roots of a plant I wanted to keep, it was easy enough to lift the plant, sort out the roots and then re-plant the "good" plant and know it would survive.

I found I couldn't do that work in garden gloves - I HAD to use bare fingers, even though I was pregnant. I justified it by saying that I'd had cats since I was a baby, they had slept in bed with me all my life and I had never been one for washing my hands after touching them - so I was therefore pretty sure I would by now be immune to toxoplasmosis.

Anyway, ds was healthy, and 4 summers (and a lot more digging) later, I'm now on top of the ground elder (except for a wee patch beside a tree where I can't dig easily - but am about to attack with glysophate!)

I might have won the war on the ground elder, but I'm still battling against the slugs....!

Off to buy some glyphosate- my back's killing from all the digging at the weekend!