Weed Woes

Hi everyone,
I've just registered on the forum and I'm hoping that over the coming years trying to fix up our new garden that your advice will be invaluable! I must point out that I know nothing about gardening, I've spent lots of time doing it just not really knowing if I'm doing right or wrong and now it's time to learn.

At the moment I am purely trying to get the garden under control, I'm not to bothered about getting anything nice to grow just yet, I'd be happy to get rid of the insane weeds.

The garden is approx 110'x50' and is for all intents and purposes just a lawned area backing onto a wood. It has suffered from serious neglect for at least the last 30 years with a only a small patch of grass being cut maybe every three months and the rest probably every 2 years! This resulted in the top 50' of the garden becoming infested with nettles, docks and thunder flowers (to name a few).
A month before we moved in our neighbour removed a 4' thick hawthorn hedge running the length of the left hand side and replaced it with a fence leaving a 6' wide strip of churned up clay from bottom to top - which is also filled with the docks and nettles.

[align=center]Google earth pic taken around July '07 - weeds cover the area within the red line.
Check out the six huge grass piles and brown grass from it's biennial mowing, oh dear.
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Very kindly my neighbour acquired some weed killer from his son who works at an agricultural college (apparently not available to the public due to it's strength?) he also kindly spent 2 hours spraying all of the weeds while I was at work (thanks Cyril) and to my joy they were all dead within 10 days - fantastic. Or maybe not, as soon as the rain started again they grew back even worse; I guessed that the removal of grass had allowed them to spread easily. So Cyril got some more and tried again, 10 days later they were all dead, now 1 month later the top and side of our garden now look like a jungle!

Now I'm getting a bit frustrated, I really struggle with time due to the kids and funny work hours and the weather has been pants for a while so digging them out is almost impossible on this scale. I considered getting a rotivator on them but was strongly advised against it being told that it would worsen the problem.

My other thoughts now are to burn them off - does this make the problem worse? I suspect it would.

or

Buying a huge tarpaulin and covering them up until they die.


If anyone can offer advice on whether either of these methods would work or anything else to try I would very much appreciate it - I'm at a bit of a loss at the minute to say the least.
Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to give you folks the background (if it makes any difference, lol)

Cheers,
Matt

 

Cyril should have used something like roundup bi active 450 spraying at a dose of 250ml per 10 litres, making two aplications, the second a fortnight after the first. Pay a proper contractor to spray it or do it yourself.

After the weeds have died off you then want to turn over the ground with a cultivator, weedkiller doesnt last forever and you soon get a flush of anual weeds sprouting. Id sudgest then seeding the area with grass seed and mowing until you work out your plans.

Rotovating alone will only chop up weed roots.

 

Hi Matt, welcome to GC

First of all-that is one tall ladder you`ve got there to get such a view?


The rotavator is not an option at all-don`t do it. All you will do is take hundreds of cuttings of the weeds and cast them about in freshly tilled earth. If you want to just clear the garden at the moment and to help relieve some tension then burn it. weed suppressing covers don`t work in the short term, if at all, and you are forever find bits of it every where-worse than the blinking weeds. I imagine Pro will come in on the weedkiller stuff-his forte, but I would burn.

From the shot you look like you live exactly where I would love to-next to a woodland type area.

 

Talk of the devil LOL

 

Thanks for the quick replies! Roundup and cultivator sound like the plan then. Paul, do you have any idea how many square metres 5 ltrs of 450 will cover?

While I'm online I may as well as something else. Because the garden is on a slope of around 1:8 I would eventually like to make two terraces. If I was to do this would the original topsoil be good enough to use? The ground is very clay like (not sure how to say clay-ee) so a lot would be dug up with it I'm sure. Also can you give me an idea of the topsoil depth needed to grow a nice lawn from seed?

I just visited topsoil.co.uk and their calculator recommends a depth of 150mm, if that was the case then I would need nearly 80 tonnes which is, errm, not gonna happen :eek:

Thanks again,
Matt

Ps - Claire. It's nice not be overlooked and not to overlook anyone but I'm sure I will get driven mad eventually by the weeds and stuff coming in from the wood and the crazy gales hitting the front of the house. pros and cons with everything I guess.

 

A hell of a lot of ground!!!!!!, I only use 10 litres of it a year and I do a lot of spraying.

Id say for an area the size you describe youd use around 3 sprayer tanks, 750 mls concentrate per spraying maximum. so youll use around 1.5 litres to complete the job.

This is aplying at maximum dose rate. For normal spraying you can use as little as 100ml per 10 litres therfore youll have loads of concentrate spare for future use!!!!

Expect to pay around £50 for 5 litres of 450

 

Sounds like Cyril used something like Gramoxone which doesn't "kill" the plant as such, it desiccates it. So the plants very quickly go yellow, but the roots can regrow. Plus if the plot has been neglected "forever" there will be lots of weed seeds. If you can make them germinate quickly, and then kill them and get the next lot to germinate you are actually getting rid of the stored-seed. As the saying goes "One years seed = 7 years weeds" :(

The fact that you are not in a hurry is good, I reckon. Leaving it fallow for a while will help reinvigorate the soil, and get more and more weed germinating, which will leave less to germinate when its all nice flower beds, and more of a pain because you will have to hand weed then.

1) Kill the weeds (2 or 3 Roundup applications each 2 weeks apart, as Pro says). Do NOT get Roundup on anything you want to keep :thumb: 'coz it will kill that too! (You need to spray it on, not water in on, hence beware of any fine spray that might drift, so use a rougher-spray pattern)

2) Use a self-propelled cultivator to rotavate the ground. Get a big one, its hard work, and a heavy self-propelled model will dig itself into the ground more easily.

3) Leave fallow. If you have perennial weeds coming back up (ground elder, bindweed, etc.) then spray with roundup when they have grown to small plantlets (i.e. let them get bigger than just seedling-size). Run a rotavtaor over the ground again - if you Round-up now, and Rotavate mid-September you might just get one more chance to Rotavate before the Winter - e.g. late October, otherwise do it in the spring after the first flush of weeds have germinated.

Check if you have Mares Tail weeds. Roundup won't kill them. They are very hard to get rid of. VERY hard :( Best solution is to get a black bin liner and walk around pulling up any you see. Put them straight into the bin liner (they have tiny spores you won't be able to see that they are spreading). Hold the plant near the bottom of its stem and you should pull up an inch or two of root with it. That will weaken it. Over time you will weaken it to the point where it isn't really a problem (although you mustn't let it grow back of course!)

4) To improve your soil you need to add compost. You will already have a "spit" (the working depth of a spade) of topsoil. If you are careful to remove just that, and not mix it with subsoil, you can re-use it once you have terraced the site.

Keep the piles of hay that have been left, that should have composted by now (it will contain weed seeds I expect, but I wouldn't be too worried, your soil is full of them anyway, it will save money over buying in compost. Although if you've only got a small pile then bonfire is probably a better disposal method!)

Consider spent mushroom compost, farmyard manure, horse manure from stables, or spent hops if you have a brewery nearby. (Read about Aminopyralid - Brand name ForeFront - contamination of manure before buying cow or horse manure). You will want a good layer - 6" to 12" - where you are going to have any flower beds, you don't need to get the soil into quite such good growing state where you are going to have lawns