What`s this weed?!

You need to be very careful with ground elder. The problem is that the roots break into lots of pieces when digging them and a new plant grows from each one . If you're going to dig them then you should dig deep, lift the whole chunk of soil that's on the fork and put it on some plastic. Then you need to painstakingly sift through the soil to remove any tiny piece of root. The root will be very white.

It took us a few years to clear an area about 20ft x 4ft but we almost totally eradicated it that way. We still get an occasional plant appearing and it gets removed immediately. If it's by another plant then that plant is removed and all the soil is taken off the roots before replanting.

Drastic measures but they works.

 

We've survived over 50 years of gardening with virtually no use of chemicals but there are exceptions.

One of them, like Silver Surfer, would be Knot weed, but fortunately we don't have it.

What we do use nowadays is Vine Weevil killer, but not on the plants in the garden. We sell plants for charity (we expect to sell over a thousand plants this weekend on our Open Garden) and we have to make sure that we aren't selling livestock as well .

The only other time we used a chemical was when there was a plague of Viburnum beetle all over the country. We have some very large Viburnums that were infested and none of the neighbours had it. So, taking advice on the matter, we used a Viburnum beetle killer so that the problem didn't spread. It worked.

 

Well all i can say is I have battled ground elder for 40 odd years here... I also use no chemicals... Neither of them are the gardeners friend as the tiniest bit of stem or root left in the ground will root again.... Enchanters is just as much a problem as ground elder... If you have an extensive amounts of both I would say 2 doses of glyphosate will probably get most of it... You will find not a lot will grow straight after glyphosate.. Good Luck but my advice is get on top of both asap.....

 

Thank you, @Silver surfer

If we count each individual plant we must have nearly 3,000 , but a few hundred of those are runner beans. Our prices for plants are quite cheap but we'd rather sell them cheaper and make sure they go to good homes. People that come to our event are all keen gardeners, from very experienced to novices. Mrs Shiney spend a lot of her time at the plant sales tables giving advice.

I've just been pricing the runner beans and we're charging only £1.50 per dozen and they're between 18" and 36" tall already because of the hot weather!

We're expecting about 500 people to turn up.