How to kill horsetails?

I'm afraid that my yard is overrun with the things. They are quite prehistoric, and I actually have a shale fossil of a plant that is very similar.

I've been pulling them for a year, but if I leave the tiniest bit of root, they just grow back.

I've tried paraquat, glyphosphate, and 2-4-d. They seem to enjoy it.

I don't want to use a soil sterilizer, but I'm stumped.

Thank you in advance

Reply to
mulroys
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Dig out the area and replace the dirt is the only thing I can think of. Personally I'm trying to get some established in a pot in my pond

Shell

Reply to
Weeble

You have to admire, even if grudgingly, a plant that is capable of withstanding everything nature and man have thrown at it since the Triassic...

If you keep at it long enough, eventually you will starve the last of the rhizomes. But it takes a lot of patience to outlast something that prehistoric.

Reply to
Christopher Green

Yup. Perhaps you can arrange to trade yards with the person in the "sectional grass" thread.

Casoron (dichlobenil) is what seems to be used most in the PNW. Haven't tried it, but I suspect it's also going to need timing in applications, and repeated applications. Oust is another that's sometimes used; again, I have no experience with it.

Black plastic will work, but it's ugly as ... mulch won't. I doubt solarization will help, at least with the deep-rooted species.

Try google for equisetum and control

Kay

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Reply to
Kay Lancaster

Take advantage of having it and dig it and pot it and sell it on ebay to the pond entuhusiasts. We had been looking for some all summer long but all the sotres that carry it were sold out in early spring.Very popular with ponders....... Visit my website:

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expressed are those of my wife, I had no input whatsoever. Remove "nospam" from email addy.

Reply to
Roy

glyphosate works, you just have to aplly is a few times and use a higher concentration.

Toad

Reply to
QuintanaCanRoll

It may take a lot of times. It will kill the tops but won't translocate to the rhizomes, which then produce new top growth. If you keep after them diligently, so the tops never get to survive long enough to replenish the rhizomes, you will eventually win.

Reply to
Christopher Green

Great! I got a half acre of the things. I guess that makes me the horsetail tycoon.

Reply to
mulroys

To the original poster, sell the place and move away. Either that, or maybe nuclear weapons, but somehow I think the horsetail would even survive that.

Reply to
Paul Below

We already tried the nukes. My boys like their new blond hair.

I can't decide weather to just learn to like the things, or plant a bunch of mint and then film next summer's hit monster movie.

"Horstail vs. Mint."

-In the garden no one can hear you curse...

Reply to
mulroys

snipped-for-privacy@worldnet.att.net (Christopher Green) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com:

Horsetails have been around since the Devonian if not earlier which means they also survived whatever cause the Permian extinctions. However, it's possible they can be displaced by other more advanced plants given the right environmental conditions, though this may require a herbivore that mows them down repeatedly..

Other than that, have you tried harnessing the most destructive force known to man: a group of pre-school kids? Perhaps a game of "pin the horsetail on the dustbin modified to look like a donkey" is in order.

Reply to
Salty Thumb

The class Sphenopsida does go back to the Devonian, and the order Equisetales was the only order of sphenopsids to survive the Permian extinction. If the extinct genus Equisetites is really the same as modern Equisetum, as some think, then Equisetum goes back to the Carboniferous, survived the Permian extinction, and is the oldest living genus of vascular plants.

Problem with grazing them is they're poisonous (especially to horses, but also to other livestock). Equisetosis is a common ailment when animals are pastured on horsetail-infested fields.

Paid a penny bounty on snails once. A hundred dollars didn't put a dent in the snail population.

Grazing or letting kids pillage it won't do any good with horsetail anyway, because it comes back from rhizomes that can run as deep as six feet.

Dichlobenil (Casoron) is the rancher's poison of choice for horsetail. It just snickers at gardeners armed with glyphosate (Roundup, Kleenup).

Reply to
Christopher Green

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