Who knows how to get rid of it without resorting to chemicals from Satan? (Thinking of roundup)
My soil is poor, but improving. Hopefully more desirable ground cover can compete in the near future. Meanwhile, I spent a day pulling it by hand from 1/4 acre. Five more days await. The plan is to let the pulled bodies of the scourge dehydrate, then brush hog, spread organic matter, disc, and seed with desireable ground cover. I’m expecting the disc/seed/wait idea to repeat at least a few times.
I’m pushing 4 acres of orchard space now, but only 1.3 acres are bad presently. I need a program for the whole orchard that will get things going without spending my life hunched over pulling evil weeds by hand.
Note: experience has shown that discing doesn’t do the job on larger specimens with healthy taproots. At best, they get knocked down but continue to grow.
Ultimately, I expect to always have an issue as birds will perpetually re-introduce seed from nearby afflicted areas. My goal is to get it to a tolerable level…one where I can walk through the orchard without a machete. Yeah, places were/are that bad!
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Sorry to hear of your plague. Do you have a picture of beast?
I sowed star thistle on the right of way…for my honeybees. Back about 20-something years ago. It’s finally looking great…but I don’t 'have bees anymore!
(Maybe need to though.)
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My bees don’t seem to bother with it.
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Don’t disc.Discing pulls up older seeds and doesn’t always kill the tap root. Let it grow and cut it just before it flowers. Then next year, do the same and again cut it before it flowers. Keep doing it until it’s almost all gone which is usually about 3 years. You’ll still see a few individual plants after that but just keep doing the same thing until they’re gone. I’ve seen lots of people control it this way. Letting it grow and cutting it right before the flowers open depletes the energy reserves in the tap root.
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My wife does something like this to control dandelions in our yard. Every day she goes on patrol and beheads all the dandelions. Now she mostly just has to control the margins where seeds blow in.
Castaneda: Do you suggest cutting or pulling prior to flowering? My understanding is that cropping them will encourage very low growth/flowering.
Othe folks? Do you suggest the same or has something different worked?
As for a torch/popping flower heads… I think I’d need a surplus military flame thrower or a battalion of flower poppers. The job is feeling monstrously huge!
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Pulling is fine. That’s just hard to do with a lot of them and sometimes they break off without coming up.
Cropping them will result in low flowering if you crop them too early. If you wait until the flowers are almost ready to open, most will not produce low flowers. They have already expended the energy they would use for flowering. There may also be a chemical trigger that tells the plant that it has already produced flowers and does not need to grow any more that season.
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I suspect that is true. I’ve wondered how helpful it would be to just vacuum dandelion heads before they blow away.
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I’m really tempted at this point to commit to 5 years of rototilling/covercropping to exhaust the seedbed but not my back.
Cutting them is a lot easier.
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