Mistakenly posted this in the Permaculture subreddits so apologies to you might've just seen this post earlier.

I've done all my research on hack & squirt and foliar treatments for ToH. The only bit of info I haven't been able to find through all the literature is how often I need to spray? Just once? Every day? Week? Using Triclopyr 3.

More curious on this with the hack & squirt method, but also curious on repetitions of foliar treatment with smaller ToH plants.

Sorry for the incredible blurry photo I'll grab another if I need to. I found this in my wildflower rows and I want to know if it's intentional or a weed I should pull. Funny enough the top of it very closely resembles the recreational version

We’re told we should get rid of them. But one person’s menace can be another person’s medicine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/magazine/weeds-gardening.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-

By Jennifer Kabat July 9, 2024 I love weeds because I am a bad gardener, and I am a bad gardener because I cannot weed. The work seems violent. What might I kill or cut off? I also cannot mow. Haphazard paths crisscross my yard, enough to avoid ticks, and the vegetable beds are full of plants most people would call weeds: docks, dandelions, broadleaf plantain and mallow.

Just how a plant is designated a weed and not an herb or a flower involves complex histories of medicine, food, language and migration. I realized that if I learned about these unwanted plants, I wouldn’t have to battle them. I began to study websites like the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (N.C.B.I.) for studies on weeds’ chemical and medicinal properties, or the Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s database of occurrences to see how and when plants have traveled. Take Achillea millefolium, yarrow, its name a hint; Achilles supposedly carried the herb to stanch his soldiers’ wounds. Its lacy-leaved stalks are linked by runners spreading among my patio’s paving stones. Broadleaf plantain, with its thick, veined leaves, hugs the ground as if to avoid attention. It too has been used on wounds and followed white settlers across North America and came to be called white man’s foot.

In the weeds I find a palimpsest of capitalism and colonialism, a living history of globalization. In the 1840s, a Bavarian doctor working for the Dutch East India Company shipped Japanese knotweed back to Europe. Soon after, he sent samples to Kew Gardens, and later the bush was described as “handsome in rough places.” It was eventually deployed to stabilize banks and ditches.

Knotweed grows down the street from me. In spring, the heart-shaped leaves don’t just line the roadside but pierce the road itself, puncturing the tarmac. The doctor who first shipped it back noted the roots’ use in Japanese and Chinese medicine, and now they’re being investigated as a possible cure for Lyme disease. The tender shoots taste of rhubarb and asparagus. I feel a perverse glee eating them. Termed an “escaped ornamental,” knotweed, I think, defies the orientalism of its original export. Today, even when so much wealth is held in real estate, in Britain property can be unsaleable if knotweed is found nearby. Lenders can refuse to back a mortgage. This weed, a relic of Europe’s collecting and conquest, now challenges the smooth functioning of capitalism.

A Mohawk artist and language educator wrote to me about these weeds I love, “In spite of having potential medicinal properties, they have destroyed our ability to access our medicinal plants, to practice our ceremonies, to practice our material culture.” The plants, she went on, have as much impact “as any human invasion.” She’s right — many were brought here by settlers to make the land more familiar or arrived hidden among grains used in farming. One such plant, the one I struggle with, is garlic mustard.

It’s one of the year’s earliest wild edibles. The flavor is in the name, and it’s easy to guess why it was brought to the United States. Its foliage rises from the leaf litter like a bouquet, a fistful of green-green-green suggesting spring itself. I eat them and hate them, not for the taste (they are tasty) but because they supplant the ephemerals: trilliums that can take nearly a decade to reach maturity, or jack-in-the-pulpit that can change sex in middle age, and the trout lilies whose colonies can survive hundreds of years. Garlic mustard is allelopathic, meaning it can produce an herbicide that stunts the growth of these flowers I adore. Trying to find a way to appreciate the plant, I started picking its blooms. A bouquet of them sits on my desk, the delicate white petals nodding in my direction. I watch, beguiled, as they transform into thrusting green seed heads that look like something Walt Whitman would conjure. I stare at the siliques, as the seedpods are called — the word itself sounds erotic — and turn to them for a different model for how to be in the world.

Whitman writes of weeds in “Leaves of Grass.” They come just after the loafing and the sex. He talks of mullein and pokeweed: “Limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields.” He goes on about grasses. “Tenderly will I use you,” he professes to their blades. He uses them as a metaphor for boundlessness, for immensity, for love. Like Whitman, I turn to them for their multiplicity, for how they exist and reproduce. Weeds can be asexual, bisexual, clonal. They thwart notions of binary sexuality. Pigweeds can self-pollinate. Other weeds propagate by extending a leaf, stalk or stolon to spread. They refuse to stay in the boxes we create for them. This is true of all plants, but especially for the ones we call weeds. In them I see intimations of what’s possible and a promiscuity that flouts the strictures that colonialism and capitalism have built.

The first time the G.B.I.F. database identifies garlic mustard in the United States is June 1, 1870, a few blocks from what is now Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I think of Whitman living and writing there, walking in the park 15 years after “Leaves of Grass” was first published. Did he pass the plant? What did he see? I know he was depressed that year. I imagine his pleasure, though, watching the bounding green seed heads, sexy and irrepressible. Now in early June in the park, along the road in the shade, you too might find the siliques waving in the breeze.

Jennifer Kabat is a writer whose memoir, “The Eighth Moon,” was published in May by Milkweed Editions. Her second book, “Nightshining,” will be published in May 2025.

Has anyone had luck daubing the “cut stump” of Canada thistle with concentrated glyphosate?

How about porcelain berry? Or daubing a few leaves of the porcelain berry?

If not I’ll try it out and let you know!

I've got an invasive barley grass over growing the moss under a big, old kwanzan cherry. I want to get rid of the grass and keep the moss. The barley is endemic all over the neighborhood. If I use vinegar, will that hurt the moss? Will it hurt the cherry? TIA for advice.

HI!! Please take this survey for my friend’s work with invasive species!! They work with bridging the gap between people and wildlife, so getting public attitudes is a must have!

https://ufl.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bgb7FhPnj8PG98O?Q_CHL=qr

Went to move it to grass and it went flipping crazy. Eugene, OR.

I’m doing a invasive bug pinning workshop August first and was wondering if anyone could help me find common, easy to find, and large enough to pin bugs for the workshop. Currently I have: spongy moth (caterpillar+moth), Japanese beetle, fall army worm (caterpillar+moth), Asian garden beetle, and spotted lantern fly. I’m aware some of these aren’t fully around yet (like the lantern fly) but thought I might as well include them, even if just to encourage people to look for them in the future. The list feels short though and I was wondering if any of you have any bugs you know to be abundant and invasive that could be used for the workshop.

Any help welcome! Thanks!

I am trying to manage our yard and an nearby 1\4 acer lot and keep them open and free from invasives. It seems every new plant I ID is an invasive. Today it's purple looestrife, but it's also bishops weed, bittersweet, TOH, garlic mustard. It's like I need to Triclopyr, 24D, gly the whole thing but I feel like it would all just be back. I am not sure what the strategy is here.

I’ve got a few acres of forest on my property. The garlic mustard is worst in areas of dappled light. I’ve been removing GM from the worst areas leaving patches of bare soil. What seeds or plants (please specify reseed vs plants) should I use to suppress regrowth of the GM. I’m in southern Ontario.

So from what I can tell this one area of my yard has burning bush, border privet, and winter creeper. The only relatively native thing growing here is poison ivy. FFS. All the plants are old and very well established.

I’m not normally a herbicide person but I’m assuming this might be a time when it’s warranted. However there is a locust I want to try to save that’s kinda in the middle of the area. There’s also a family of TNR cats that shelter under the shed and trailer (you can see the corner of the structures to the left) I’m worried about poisoning them accidentally.

Am I wasting my time if I just try to cut them down?

Appears to be an eburia haldemani from a quick Google search but I don't recall ever seeing one here and it shows their habitat as being central US from what I could find.

Looks so cool, just wish it wasn’t pushing out the natives.