Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose farm and while I'd love nothing
more than to be talking to you about the beautiful Rose sits underneath this
mound somewhere unfortunately it's being covered over by this plant bindweed a
voracious vine that is my least favorite weed altogether there are probably two
or three that give me a lot of trouble but this one takes the title as my least
favorite weed let me take you through it today
what bindweed is its life cycle and what hope do you have to get rid of it from
your garden once it started to establish itself this Rose is 'Complicata' and you
should recognize the compound leaves of the rose there now as I scroll up into
the left those the larger simple leaves those are from the bindweed and if you
look carefully here you're also going to see this this pinkish purplish vine here
is what it's using to climb up the plant and it will swallow this Rose whole if I
let it so what is this plant this vine is from the con value Lacey a family
which is the morning glory family and in fact that's its other common name people
will call it Morning Glory even though it is slightly different than the
ornamental Morning Glory that we that we grow in gardens on purpose this one you
wouldn't grow on your in your garden on purpose the other plant that it's
related to is sweet potato vine so the edible sweet potato vine not the yams
the truly abs but the sweet potato vines are also from this family just have a
more tuberous root and now a close-up of the flowers here we have the beautiful
white fused flowers and for those observant amongst you yes I have
cleavers along the fence too yes my my fence line is a real joy and the flowers
are nice enough that if this thing were less of a pain you might be even tempted
to let it be unfortunately it won't just be on its own it wants to take over the
entire world and it does that through a set of underground runners or routes let
me show you those well here's the garden bed rights at the time and
trouble to remove a whole bunch of bindweed recently but I bet you there's
some left over well here you go it's popped up again very quickly from the
same spots and from the surrounding area so one thing to do is give this a little
bit of a dig and see what I can show you for the roots that are underneath
there's another big section heading off in another direction as I pull on that I
can feel it pulling back and it snapped off there that's one thing that makes it
tricky about handling this is that it's such a brittle root system that where
it's wandered you're not going to be able to find all of the little pieces
that break off as you try to get rid of it
keep on digging here I know here's another big piece oh there you go so
that's just heading off in another direction and I bet you if I keep on
digging back this way I'm gonna find even more some people say that this can
run eight or nine feet that wouldn't surprise me I don't think that's an
exaggeration is it even as I dig this small area here I'm finding it heading
off in all sorts of directions and as I pull it it's snapping off the cardinal
sin and trying to control bindweed is to leave it alone for a while here I ran
out of time early in the season haven't had as much time to maintain this edge
of my garden and it's grown up this evergreen tree in a big way if past
experience is any guide it will continue to grow up that evergreen all the way up
to 25 or 30 feet if I let it and that whole time it will be delivering all
that energy right back down to that expansive root system that we looked at
now the finally does tend to tangle together so it's easy enough to pull off
big swaths all at once if you stay on top of it the problem is that if you
don't do that as a weekly task you can't stay right on top of it so at
some point or another if you want to control the bindweed
you're going to have to go back down and kill those roots how do I propose that
you kill these roots that's the question that's the million-dollar question and I
have three methods to discuss here the first of which I'm going to call the
old-fashioned way or the hard way or maybe even the right way depending on
which direction you take it from and that is to remove the top growth to dig
around and get as much of the roots as you can to remove them from the location
and then to repeat that process over and over again until you've stripped the
roots of as much energy as you can what I like to do is use a piece of PVC
pipe like this and mark the spot in the garden that way as I walk around I'll
remember I have 10 markers out in the garden in the areas that I'm trying to
eradicate the bindweed and I'll place them around the garden
like that and then I'll go when I'll find my markers and then I'll dig in
that area or look in that area and see if any bindweed is coming up now
remember this could take a long long time to be effective every piece of root
that's in there has a chance of coming back and the more energy is in those
pieces of roots the thicker pieces of roots the more they will come back so
this may be a project that takes you a little bit of time hopefully not a lot
every week for the next several months until you see significant reductions
between the intervals between the times that the bindweed tries to pop up again
the second method I'm going to talk about is chemical and I know as a 100%
fact that I'm going to take a bunch of heat for even talking about using
chemicals for weed control in the garden if you are one of those people who for
health reasons or for moral reasons or for other reasons would not use chemical
controls in your garden I respect the hell out of that and 100% support your
your decisions on that and even to the extent that if you want to go down into
the comments of this video and want to share your reasons for doing that happy
to have you do so I think everybody should get a good understanding of the
full picture before they go ahead and use chemical controls in their garden
what I'm going to discuss fairly narrowly in this in this video is
whether I are useful in controlling bindweed and the answer is yes both
glyphosate and 2 - 4 D which are pretty common weed killers on the market have a
pronounced effect on bindweed and will go down and start killing those
roots they won't probably solve your problem in one application you might
need three or four applications as you weaken the roots of the plant one thing
I will say is that even as it is a danger to that plant it's also a danger
to the other plants in your garden so one thing I would recommend if you're
going to go this route is to put down a spray barrier like this so cover over
and use it like this
to prevent prevent the risk of spray drift in your gardens that you don't end
up getting it onto the foliage or bark or stems of other plants you'll notice a
lot of shrubs do have very pronounced reaction to even slight exposure to
2, 4 -D resulting in stunted growth and discoloration I also should say on the
chemical method that that is not available to everyone everywhere there
are some jurisdictions now that restrict the use of garden chemicals I know in BC
and Alberta here in Canada there are some some restrictions on using things
like 2 4 D on the consumer end so you may have to check what the rules are
where you are and the third method that I can at least talk about is the use of
weed barrier fabric like this this is a Geo textile they call it I guess which
is intended to be a barrier it allows moisture through from the top and down
into the soil it does not allow weeds to grow up from it if you put this down and
you leave it down what will happen is the the roots will still send their
leaves up underneath this but they won't get any light and they'll die back after
that the problem is that they will then try to find their way around the edges
of the fabric so as you put this down and if you maintain that as a way to try
to kill off your you're buying weed you may have to check it on a weekly basis
at least for the first while and then readjust the outside edge of the fabric
so that your to so that your bind weed doesn't just escape around it and
continue to feed energy into those roots now I have to say that landscape fabric
like this is not my very favorite thing for soil life and as a mulch
I prefer mulch as a bark but in certain situations including that where you have
a persistent problem with a perennial weed like buying weed and perennial
meaning it's a weed that comes back year after year
unlike annual weeds which are pretty easy to knock down or or remove but
perennial weeds can be a lot more difficult so in that case this is
something that you can consider as you can tell from the footage my own battle
with buying weed is far / I have a couple of handicaps in this
matter including a very large property and not enough time in the spring to
follow up properly about the bindweed what I usually do is let it grow quite
large in the spring and then try to catch it up and have a little more time
in the summer and the demands of my nursery have come down a little bit
exactly the wrong thing to do as you may know from what I've already discussed in
your own battle against buying weed probably your key determinants or
success are determination hard work and patience I wish you the best in it if
anybody else has any comments or even methods that have worked well for them
I'd love to hear those in the bottom of the video I will update you as my battle
progresses