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Perhaps the gardener has no more unpleasant enemy than weeds. They are capable of unbalancing the most calm and experienced person. It would seem that you have just weeded a garden bed on your property and you can calmly admire the fruit of your efforts for a few days, but then it rained, you were distracted for a week, and lo and behold, there was a forest of grass again, and all that was left of the cultivated plants, as they say, were horns, yes legs. Wheatgrass weed is the most prominent representative of these villains in plant form. For many years now, no matter how many ways they have come up with to fight it, it is alive and well and is exploring more and more new territories.
In fact, wheatgrass is just a plant, so, of course, it is possible to cope with it, you just need to choose a certain strategy and follow it strictly. This article is dedicated to how to get rid of creeping wheatgrass.
Full face and profile portrait
Before you think about how to deal with wheatgrass, you need to get to know this plant better, because, despite all its obvious disadvantages for a gardener, it also has advantages. Wheatgrass provides excellent hay and nutritious green fodder for livestock and poultry.The plant has medicinal properties, and it’s not for nothing that cats and dogs often eat it when they feel unwell. Therefore, before you destroy wheatgrass on your site completely and irrevocably, think about whether the plant may still be useful to you.
So, what does creeping wheatgrass look like? And it looks like the most ordinary grass from the cereal family. It is a perennial plant, which must be taken into account when starting the fight against it. The main attraction of wheatgrass is its rhizome, which is capable of branching and crawling (hence the species name) over long distances. In the horizontal plane, the rhizome of one plant is quite capable of covering a surface area of three square meters. But wheatgrass rarely penetrates deeper than 15-20 cm.
Wheatgrass, a photo of which you can see below, is able to reproduce by seeds and rhizome segments, and so successfully that even a centimeter segment is enough for the plant to produce a stem with a leaf.
Wheatgrass is popularly called wheatgrass and dog's tooth for its ability to pierce (prick) crops of cultivated plants, as well as plover and zhitets for its similarity with cultivated grain plants (wheat, rye).
Wheatgrass can reach 1.5 meters in height. In the close-up photo you can see that its leaves sometimes acquire a bluish tint.
Since the plant belongs to the cereal family, its flower has the appearance of an erect spike.
Wheatgrass is truly a super hardy plant.
The plant easily tolerates any drought and frost, and its seeds begin to germinate already at temperatures of +2°C-+3°C. Of course, all these qualities taken together form the appearance of a malicious pest of gardens and vegetable gardens.
Crushing blow with chemistry
If you are racking your brains over the problem of how to remove wheatgrass from your garden, then using herbicides will help you in any case. Herbicides, that is, chemicals that destroy plants, have been known for a long time, but only in recent years have those that are considered relatively safe appeared. They are divided into:
- continuous action herbicides, which are best used to treat large areas without planting cultivated plants;
- selective herbicidesthat are suitable for lawns or beds with already planted vegetables.
Among the drugs most actively used by gardeners, the following should be mentioned:
- Tornado;
- Roundup;
- Hurricane Forte;
- Ground;
- Agrokiller;
- Fusilade Forte.
When the active substance of such drugs gets on the green part of the plant, it quickly spreads throughout the body, penetrates the roots, the synthesis of substances is disrupted and the wheatgrass dies. The disadvantage of these drugs is that they do not affect the seeds and their germination, therefore, after a single treatment, new plants often emerge from the ground and quickly conquer their territory.
Hence the conclusion: herbicide treatment should be carried out at least twice.
It is believed that the half-life of harmful components after exposure to herbicides is 2-4 weeks. That is, after this period, the garden can be sown with the necessary plants or seedlings can be planted.Thus, it makes sense to carry out the processing procedure either in early spring or in the fall after harvesting. Gardeners who have used this method believe that it is very effective in destroying wheatgrass in the garden. But the question of the complete harmlessness of herbicides remains open.
Organic farming methods
Organic farming and its methods are becoming increasingly popular among summer residents and gardeners. And for good reason, because they make it possible, without disturbing the natural balance, to quite realistically cope with problems that even chemicals cannot always cope with. If you do not want to use chemicals, but do not know how else to get rid of the weed called creeping wheatgrass, then organic farming will come to your aid.
EM – drugs
Relatively recently, scientists have developed new drugs that are accumulations of certain microorganisms. When healthy plant tissues are treated in small concentrations (as is the case with homeopathy), they can not only improve the development of plants, but also protect them from diseases. But if the concentration is increased 10 times and the damaged plant tissues are treated with them, then the microorganisms, once on fresh cuts, trigger the fermentation mechanism, the roots lose their viability and the plants die. It is with the help of this mechanism that you can get rid of wheatgrass in the garden.
The most well-known EM drugs are:
- Shine;
- Baikal EM-1;
- EM molasses;
- Tamir;
- Revival;
- Gumazat EM is universal.
The scheme for combating wheatgrass using EM preparations is as follows: in the fall, after harvesting, it is necessary to prune all unnecessary plants, including the creeping wheatgrass weed at soil level. On the same day, spray the entire mowed area with any of the EM preparations in a concentration increased by 10 times compared to the traditional one.
An additional consequence of such treatment is that microorganisms will stimulate the germination of wheatgrass seeds, which, having begun to grow, will quickly fall under the first frost. If you repeat the same operation in early spring after the next shoots appear, you can finally destroy those wheatgrass plants that did not die in the fall.
Mulching the soil
To get rid of wheatgrass, you just need to cover the areas where it has settled with any dark material: film, roofing felt, non-woven material or just cardboard. This method will not let you down if you put the shelters in early spring and keep them until the beginning of winter. The only problem is that in this way they fight wheatgrass only in small areas. For a large area, finding so much dark material to cover plants seems difficult.
But in small areas it is difficult to come to terms with the idea that this land will be taken out of production throughout the entire warm season. Therefore, this method works best to destroy wheatgrass in the inter-rows of beds with plants.
Green manure - rescuers
Green manures are plants that, when sown and mowed before flowering, improve the condition of the soil.Many of them, especially plants from the legume family, are able to enrich the soil with nutrients, while others help fight weeds, displacing them.
Many gardeners save themselves from the wheatgrass invasion by sowing the areas where it has begun to grow especially actively with oats or rye. This operation can be done both in spring and autumn after harvesting. First, the soil must be cultivated or dug up at least half a shovel deep, without even selecting the wheatgrass rhizomes.
Then sow rye or oats in ribbons with a distance of 15 cm between them. After about 5-6 weeks, when the plants reach 15 cm, they must be cut, cultivated again and, if weather conditions permit, the area must be re-sown with rye or oats. If you repeat this procedure about three times in total, the wheatgrass will be destroyed on your site forever.
Interestingly, wheatgrass also does not like some cultivated plants, such as peas, corn, beans, and sunflowers. If you plant the seeds of these plants densely on a plowed field, then when they grow, they will be able to strangle its root system and the creeping wheatgrass will be done away with.
Agrotechnical techniques
These methods of controlling weeds are probably known to all gardeners, however, they can be effective in small areas with a certain perseverance, patience and hard work.
- Digging with careful selection of wheatgrass roots. This must be done using a pitchfork, since a shovel will only cut the rhizomes of the plants, and it will be almost impossible to remove them completely. Pitchforks usually do an excellent job of this task.
- Constantly prune young wheatgrass plants at ground level.This method of combating wheatgrass is actually designed to ensure that sooner or later, no roots will survive and will die without being supplied with nutrition from the above-ground leafy parts of the plants.
- Periodically crushing the roots of the plant using a cultivator. When using this method, it is important to remove young wheatgrass seedlings from the ground in time, before their roots have time to form a new powerful layer.
- Strange as it may sound, you can fight wheatgrass in your garden by simply ignoring it. In this case, cardboard is laid directly on top of the plants, a variety of plant debris is placed on top, which is covered with a layer of fertile soil. The edges of the improvised garden bed can be lined with stones or bricks and any garden plants can be planted there. Wheatgrass will not be able to survive under such a structure.
In the old days, the whole village usually struggled with wheatgrass, but now, given the number of abandoned plots, we have to take measures ourselves to protect the borders from the uninvited guest. This is easy to do if you do not have a very large area, digging strips of slate or any plastic into the ground on the neighbors side to a depth of 25-30 cm to protect against plant rhizomes.
Traditional methods
In terms of combating wheatgrass, all means are good, and perhaps you will be interested in some folk methods of getting rid of this weed.
- Baking Soda – Using a strong baking soda solution to water your wheatgrass bushes can easily get rid of the pesky plant.
- Salt is the cheapest of the folk remedies that get rid of wheatgrass.If you sprinkle it on top of the plants, then after watering or rain it will be absorbed into the ground and significantly limit the growth of wheatgrass.
- Citric acid - if 3 tablespoons of the substance are dissolved in 1 liter of hot water and sprayed with the resulting solution of wheatgrass, then it will take a long time for him to recover.
- Vinegar – for spraying wheatgrass it is better to take 15-20% vinegar, but for destroying the above-ground parts of plants, 9% is also suitable. Unfortunately, it is difficult to destroy the root system of wheatgrass with vinegar; the product is only good for annual weeds.
- Ethyl alcohol - it may be difficult to find this drug at the dacha, however, if you dilute it in a ratio of 1:10 and cultivate the soil, it guarantees the destruction of wheatgrass for the entire next gardening season.
- Boiling water or a blowtorch - both are effective mainly against the ground part of wheatgrass. Some time after treatment, it is able to recover from the rhizomes again.
As you can see, it is quite possible to deal with wheatgrass, and the choice of means is quite wide. You just need to remember that everything needs moderation.
