New Poll! What is your worst weed?

[VirginVegGrower]

I love convolvulus so I am voting couch grass/twitch first, closely followed by dandelions. Although biodynamic gardening uses a preparation containing yarrow, stinging nettle, chamomile, oak bark and dandelion. Interesting as I have quite a few.

[CimaDirapa]

Couch grass, no matter how many years you mulch to suppress weeds this plant is phenomenon, it will stay underneath for yonks just waiting for the right conditions. As I always followed permaculture methods (I am not a hippy but some of their points make sense) I never pull the weeds but simply howe them when and where, the random loopy block from RC had a good point about leaving the roots to decompose. After three long years of doing exactly that I have hardly any weeds.

[VirginVegGrower]

As I always followed permaculture methods (I am not a hippy but some of their points make sense) I never pull the weeds but simply howe them when and where, the random loopy block from RC had a good point about leaving the roots to decompose. After three long years of doing exactly that I have hardly any weeds.

Interesting. Turnips are said to deter couch grass. Not sure how true this is. But I am half inclined to start the turnip diet and plant a hooge ring of steel (turnips) around my plot

[Normans Mum]

It's got to be horsetail. Absolutely everywhere. However, have just decided to weed as seen and continue planting around it as I don't think will ever get rid of it completely.

[petal]

bindweed closely followed by horsetail! Nettles are great for butterflies(well .. caterpillars!) so I allow a patch of them to grow. the turkeys like them too. bindweed chokes and smothers- ugh!

[Madasafish]

I love Himalayan Balsam .. but 10,000 seedlings over your veg patch - and very tough seedlings - means it is extremely effective at spreading. A real pia.

The rest are just normal hazards of gardening..

[Speed Gardener]

Bindweed is Public Enemy Number One with me, it gets everywhere. I grow a lot of soft fruit and with the warm starts to the year we seem to have, the bindweed gets a good hold before the poor old fruit gets going. I have to spend too much precious time fighting this wretched weed, it's like fighting a forest fire, just when you think you've won, it comes up somewhere else!

[snohare]

Snowberries. I've seen them described as a good plant for beginners as they grow "reasonably quickly".... It will happily grow through 2 feet of added soil even after being horribly mutilated. I wish I could eat the snowberries, just to spite them, but unfortunately they are poisonous to humans.

You have my complete sympathy rinabean. I first met these little darlings while clearing a railway embankment full of them...the roots, I was informed (and experience does not contradict) go up to fifteen feet down, and thirty feet sideways, before popping up as stolons.
But I'll let you know a little secret - a Sheen flame gun really knocks 'em back on their heels. Never had any more problems after an afternoon of scorch and burn...

[di]

Can't believe I'm the fist to mention thistles. They're the only ones that cause me true misery. Hoe them and they split and become many, too deep to pull, leave an odd hoed leaf and it turns to a brittle viscious piece of nastiness. Not notice one and bend down to weed something else and get a nasty surprise on your rear.

They're almost as close to evil as wasps!

[di]

All that said, I do love it when a load appear on a fairly recent yet still empty bed, the satisfaction of loosening the soil and pulling the whole thing out is only comparable to couch grass roots.

[frogga]

My dilemma has to be buttercup, everyday new ones appear!

[FoxHillGardener]

Docks and celandine, closely followed by bindweed and creeping buttercup

[snakeshack]

gotta be the horsetail most of the others are easy if you don't mind using glyphosate,you can even provide canes for bindweed to grow up so its easy to spray and the annuals succumb to the old flame gun,but nothing touches horsetail. I hoe it ,pull it up cover with black plastic for a year,tried digging it out (gave up 2 ft down),flame gunned it ,mulched with a foot of straw,and finally jumped up and down on it o provide a breach and gave it the old sticky agent orange (double strength glyphosate mixed in with non fungicidal wallpaper paste to make it stick)
looked this weekend and its back growing like a saturn five rocket on launch ,even on the patch where I had a very large and very hot fire.

[chris]

I missed this thread, bit late but my worst one is knotweed. I'm starting to dream about the bloomin' stuff!

[Marcher]

We only moved here the middle of last year so we haven't had a full season to assess the full round but so far the problem weeds are:

Ground elder - it's strangling borders, under some of the trees and is moving into grass areas
Couch grass - we are digging it up in all the vegetable beds
Docks - these have self seeded everywhere
Celendine - it's spread across the lawn and borders

I've voted for creeping buttercup as it is everywhere and the field next to us is full of it, but ground elder is turning out to be the bigger problem.

The only way to get rid of docks is to pull them up with the roots before they set seed. We had a problem with those in the past, the problem was that they blew in off a neglected field.
I also have creeping buttercups but I like them, there aren't many wildflowers in my newly seeded lawn, so I let it spread in a few areas which I don't work. Wild Geraniums grow in the grass too, ad lovely daisies of course. The first year that I seeded the lawn it was overrun by all sorts of weeds - mostly knapweeds and dandelion, so I pulled most out by the roots and they haven't returned in significant numbers yet.