Sodium chlorate would be my choice. If applied carefully it will keep weeds at bay for months and will not run off in a concentration that would threaten the health of your river and aquifer. It has been banned in the EU, unfortunately. Elsewhere it is getting rather pricey, but still economical if you poke around a bit.
Stinger is taken in by the leaves. It works its way down to the roots. I only sprayed leaves, as directed.
At $80 a quart* [enough for spraying four acres of crops], and available only by mail, there aren't going to be any other users in the town.
Don.
I should have made it clear that glyphosate is absorbed only through leaves and not through roots, but from the Dow information on clopyralid:
" Clopyralid is absorbed by the foliage and roots of plants..."
I suppose that anything that works well isn't going to be cheap. Still, that quart should last you a good few years!
I'm still working on it. First I now use an ounce for a gallon. The instructions are all about how many pints per acre (e.g. 1/2 to 1).
Then the Canada thistle keeps popping up in new locations. The back yard is about 1/2 acre in size. Some is overgrown. The location where the infestation started, and where I started to spray, is now clear. But each time I go out I find an entirely new area infested with mostly small plants. So small I could probably pull them up and leave no root behind. But then there will be a big one or two, like inside of a untamed rose bush.
At the last spraying there were seeds flying all around. Even from small plants. I hope spraying the seeds killed the seeds. I know the battle will continue into the next season.
I am also fighting an infestation of garlic mustard in one corner of the yard. This one will be easier. I pulled the second year up last year as it was going to seed. This Spring I made sure I got every second year before it went to seed. Do that again next Spring and I should be done. Maybe a few seeds take two years to germinate, but I can look for those in a couple years.
I figured out what the survival strategy is for biannuals. Garlic mustard likes forests. If the plant was an annual, and a forest fire came through just before putting out seeds, it would wipe out the plant. For a biannual, if a forest fire came through, the second year would get wiped out, but the low first year would survive.
Don
no, that's not how seeds work, some will remain viable for quite some time. sure you may have gotten the most recent crops of seeds, but there are likely plenty more in the soil that can eventually sprout given the right conditions.
thistle seeds get moved around by birds/animals. i dig them up when they try to get going in the more formal gardens here, but they are all over in other places.
aside from thistles and garlic mustard we also have things like sow thistle and some invasive grasses i keep under control using manual methods. i don't like using any herbicides here if i can avoid it.
a few spots of morning glory mayhem which i would never plant again anywhere. poison ivy, wild grape vines, sumac...
luckily we never got into blackberries.
those are just the wild plants to try to work around then there are the honeysuckles we planted and the lavender which we both are reactive if we get sap on the skin, the garlic i scattered around and have been trying to weed out ever since, introduced plants from wildflower seed mixes which aren't very nice and spread all over the place... and then there's pennyroyal and others of the mint family, yarrows, ... :)
the nice thing is that we are ok with thymes and they are doing well at taking over some spaces that used to be weed magnets. once they fill in that calms down an area nicely. not much bothers them.
i really can't wait until i can take what little grassy areas are left and turn them into gardens of one kind or another. there's plenty of grasses around us, i don't really need them here though. i'd much rather have strawberries or something flowering or edible (or both).
songbird
This is probably not very helpful to you, but when I bought this property it had a couple of acres of lawn/pasture surrounding the house which was infested with a variety of weeds, mostly dandelions, plantain and thistles.
Spraying and regular mowing never really worked as it just seemed to create new opportunities for weeds to establish themselves again.
A few years ago I wised up and applied plenty of fertiliser and lime, kept it well irrigated and ran sheep on it. Even after the first year the difference was quite noticeable, by the second year the weeds were essentially completely gone. The better types of grass have dominated the pasture now too and grows super lush. I rarely need to use herbicides anywhere on the property now.
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