From someone on another forum, who saw this quote on yet another forum....
Here's one person's solution, from GardenWeb, and using the devil glysophate ... but it an apparently very contained application. I like the idea of a dilute solution being able to get the heart of the beast .-- (Nancy PNW)
•Posted by Bry84 England
Sun, Feb 13, 05 at 10:24
I had trouble with bindweed for years, the whole garden was infested with it and nothing would stop it. I pulled it out the first year, but a week later the stuff had grown several foot of new plant. I tried weed killer the next year which slowed it down somewhat, but only for a matter of two weeks rather than one... Gardening is close to impossible when it gets this well established, the massive root system of the plant goes about 15 foot deep and can throw out endless meters of plant growth all summer. I've seen it scale to the top of a 5 foot fence in just three days. Of all the weeds I've had in my garden, this one is the weed from Hell.
Well, I tried just about everything and looked in to how professional gardeners, farmers and various other industries dealt with the stuff. Disappointingly they accepted in most cases that it could never be fully eradicated. Not the news I wanted so I set out to find my own solution. The main problem with bindweed is the massive deep root network, so if you kill that the result should be good. Glyphosate weed killers (like roundup) are taken in to the roots of weeds and kill them, so I tried them first and discovered that they didn't have lasting effects on such a large plant. The quantity absorbed by the foliage isn't enough to kill the main root system, it's just too big, and increasing the concentration of glyphosate would cause the foliage to die faster and quickly cut off the absorption. What you need is slow poisoning, that way the plant and it's vast roots will absorb as much glyphosate as possible before it becomes terminal.
I collected the long strands of bindweed and wrapped them up in balls that I placed inside old jars and tin cans. These I filled with a glyphosate based weed killer, but I mixed it with about 1/3 more water than the instructions suggested, then I covered them over with plastic which I taped down firmly to keep animals and rain out. Do be aware that if these are knocked over and spilt on to plants you want they will die, so it's advisable to keep them at a distance and partly bury them in the ground for stability. It takes time, but I could clearly see the level in the containers reducing as the plant absorbed it. This seemed to work faster in the hot weather as the plant would be drawing more water, and also not removing the new bindweed shoots as they emerge since their growing is causing the plant to soak up more weedkiller, and also these shoots will be your next place to attach another can of solution when the old ones die off. For the first couple of months I saw no effect, although the bindweed had sucked in several pints of weed killer, but then it started to slow down, and after a while I noticed the new growth was an unhealthy yellow colour with holes in the misshapen leaves. About four months after starting this the main root system must have collapsed as the plant just withered away, even the bindweed across the road died (must have been one huge plant under the garden/road). It did continue to sprout the very occasional sickly yellow shoot, but a quick spray of weedkiller dealt with them nicely.
I dreaded the next year as I thought it would come back just as bad, but actually I only found three or four small clumps of bindweed and they were quickly eradicated with a few more pots of weed killer. The third year I found none. Of course seedlings will be a problem if you have neighbours with it in their garden, but they're a million times easier to deal with than the mature plant. More often than not I've just pulled them out and they never came back.
Topic: bindweed help!!! (Read 3596 times)
