How to get rid of goutweed on your plot: don't leave the weed a chance

This herbaceous plant with beautiful carved leaves and delicate white umbrellas is well known to many gardeners and summer residents.

Some people specially grow goutweed on their plots and then use it for culinary and medicinal purposes, while others consider this plant a dangerous weed.

Anastasia Kovrizhnykh , an expert of the online publication "BelNovosti", an agronomist and landscape designer, told how to get rid of goutweed.

Of course, the young shoots of this plant, which have a pleasant taste and beneficial properties, can be added to soups and salads, and also used for various home preparations.

However, over time, goutweed becomes coarser and turns into an aggressive weed.

An unpretentious, frost-resistant, shade-tolerant plant with a powerful, highly branched, creeping rhizome grows quickly, aggressively capturing new, most fertile areas of land.

Weeds growing in the garden obscure the beds and draw healing moisture and nutrients from the soil.

It should also be noted that goutweed, growing in large quantities on the site, quite often attracts various pests and becomes a source of dangerous diseases, preventing the growth of garden and flower crops.

Methods of struggle

If thickets of goutweed have appeared on the site, then various agricultural measures will help to quickly deal with this weed, which include mowing, pruning and manual weeding.

It is advisable to cut goutweed growing among flower and vegetable crops with garden shears or a very sharp knife, after which it is necessary to loosen the soil around the cultivated plants.

The area must be weeded before the weed leaves bloom, since at this time the root system of the goutweed can be depleted more quickly.

All goutweed sprouts found during weeding should be immediately removed from the soil and sent to a compost pit or buried.

You can protect garden crops growing in beds from goutweed and other weeds using brown or black covering material.

In this case, all cultivated plants will develop and grow faster, and weed sprouts will die without sunlight and fresh air.

Before using the covering material, you need to carefully dig up the garden, remove all stones and rhizomes of perennial weeds. Next, you need to carefully level the top layer of soil, then cover the soil with covering material.

Weeds rarely appear in areas that are covered with mulch made from chopped tree bark, small sawdust, pine needles or chopped straw.

Mulch not only stops the further spread of goutweed across the site, but also protects plants with a superficial root system from viral and fungal diseases, pests and the scorching sun.

The fastest, most effective and reliable way to combat goutweed and other weeds is to treat the area with herbicides.

It is recommended to use such products if large weed thickets have appeared on the site.

Herbicides that act systemically not only kill weeds, but also prevent further spread of new weeds.

It is also recommended to treat areas around greenhouses, outbuildings, residential buildings, as well as areas along fences with solutions based on these preparations.