I am involved in a holy ware against the weeds again this year.
The past two years, I though that if I just picked the weed and dropped in in place, the it would stop them from seeding.
Well, It is worse than ever this year. Apparently, when you pull the weed, whatever it has left in it puts its effort into seeding. Now I have four times as much cheat grass! Poop!
This years I pull them and stick them into a bag for disposal. So far, two big garbage bags full of cheat Grass and others.
some plants are different, you gotta know the life cycle to be effective. some plants you can pull as they are flowering and they won't be able to ripen the seed fast enough. others will persist and get ripe enough seeds to continue. so it sounds like cheat grass is one that you have to target earlier to control it.
the best defense against weeds is a good offense, plant radishes, turnips, buckwheat and any other cover crops you can get going so that there are fewer hospitable places for them to use.
ah, ok, i looked it up, it is an annual, but you have to get it early (in the fall/winter before spring).
get a stirrup hoe and scrape the ground a few times when you see it coming up. no plant will survive that. you don't even have to (nor do you want to in many cases) disturb the soil much. just skim it along the surface to chop it off.
now that you have a seed bank established it will take several years of consistent effort to get rid of it. i know how that goes, i have something called speedwell here which is annoying and a perennial. very cute blue flowers, but the smell of it when weeding it gets my nose running really bad so i now remove it on sight. it's all over the place though. it will be years before i have a chance of getting rid of it. make a good dent each year but the lawn mower and some lack of weeding means it can still get spread around.
I've been battling sticky weed on banks in the back and we bagged weeds and put them in the trash but it came back since some things seed like crazy. I Preened the banks this year and it helped but some weed is back. We have had same problem with Japanese stilt grass. Garden center said pulling just lets other seeds in the soil sprout and only solution is lots of premerg.
In a couple of years, it's rotted down to good compost.
After a couple of years buried under a couple feet of vegetable waste and s heep manure, they're pretty much killed out. If any survive, they get picke d when they sprout in the garden and go back to the compost pile. The garde n rows are all heavily mulched so very few weeds make it through the mulch into the light.
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