Flower bed - seriously invasive weeds

attila_

Hello I have a flower bed around 18ft by 2ft and have finally managed to rip everything out of it (old shrubs etc) and would like to start having a much neater flower and shrub bed plus perhaps a fruit tree.

The issue I have is that it's been full of weeds, mainly bindweed which has been difficult to remove. I've turned the soil about a spades depth but I know they are still all at the bottom waiting for when I put new plants.

Bindweed is terrible - is there something I can apply whilst it's just bare soil? And when it's planted is there something I can do about weeds?

I don't have any issues with weed killer - I just want them gone!

Many thanks

DaftyDuck

If the bed is free of plants you want, now is the time to apply weedkiller. Glyphosate will do the job, but you may want to give two applications a few weeks apart. You may also need to buy some selective lawn weedkiller, as many of those weeds will be hiding in the lawn as well.

With bindweed in particular you can dunk bits. Waituntil it is five inches long, then poke the tendril in a small pot of diluted glyphosate. Leave it in for an hour or so, then move the pot on to the next bit. Lightly crushing the leaves helps.

peter_the_piper

In addition to above, Glyphosate only affects the leaves and stems of growing weeds and does not have any prevention effect.

arbrighton

If you can, while it is still empty, keep digging it and pick up every single piece of the white brittle roots you can see- each fragment can grow into a new plant unfortunately.
Also, apparently Tagetes releases something into the soil which stops bind weed and ground elder- might be worth a try.

Mojoworking

What is tagetes please - can you just walk into b and q and ask for it? Sorry to sound thick x

voucher

http://www.thenaturalgardener.co.uk/tagetes.php

Davesnave

If you've dug the bed and removed all visible weeds there's no weedkiller available now which will stop re-growth of bindweed and similar. The only commonly available weedkiller is glyphosate, sold under various trade names, which works through the leaves and breaks down on contact with soil.

Bindweed can be beaten, but only with persistence, and it's hard to conquer it while growing other plants alongside. Nevertheless, when I bought my house about 5 years ago, there were two medlar trees totally hidden by it, and now they're free of the stuff. I get the occasional tendril and I zap it as soon as there's enough for the weedkiller to work properly.

I'm afraid it wasn't a situation where tagetes would have helped, let alone cured the problem.

I_have_spoken

If the bed has been cleared, I'd suggest now is the time to put down a good quality horticultural membrane to smother regrowth of the weeds and germination of annual seeds.

Next spring, replant the bed by cutting X in the membrane to plant through it then cover with 10-20mm gravel. Don't try and plant through gravel as that's a pig of a job as I found out