I think I've got Ground Elder in my lawn

A light spray is all that is required. If you overspray it just runs off and is wasted.

 

Thanks, Its just not easy to spread 1ltr in a spray over 20 square mtrs I just wondered how others managed to do that. When my next lot arrives I will have more faith and try and spread it as a very light mist. I'm expecting to see signs of everything dying off in around 3 weeks from spray date

 

If you have a decent sprayer it isn't all that difficult. Yesterday I sprayed almost 200 sq m of paths and gravel in mum in law's garden at 3 litres per 100 sq m. I used a 5 litre sprayer with a weedkiller 'hood' and filled it to 3 litres twice. Took about 45 minutes.

 

Hi again,

I have not sprayed the ground elder areas yet this year since last oct/sept's first aplication with roundup. The main lawn is a big mess now with lots and lots of thick sheets of moss growing because the grass was killed. Although there is still quite a lot of grass in some areas, probably because it was done quite late in the year so didnt work as well.

The ground elder is now growing back all over the main lawn and also in other lawned sections of the garden and the boarders, its blummin everywhere really. This has been made worse because lots of the soil from the ground elder was moved to different parts of the garden when I had a large section of the lawn slabbed last year so all the roots will have been spread about.

I do still have some roundup from last year but wanted to ask will this still be ok to use and be as effective now? or has anything better come along on the market for eradicating the ground elder more successfully? I found something on the net called scotts roundup pro biactive is this better than usual roundup?

A couple of weeks ago I had a man come round from a lawn treatment firm in the hope that they might take over the job as its proving a rather too much for me but he said they only deal with grass feeding and treatment and not killing it. He said I will have it spray it myself and after that they would come back to scarify the area and re seed it but it should be re seeded in April because of the summer. I have cancelled that appointment as I have not managed to kill it again yet and then I wanted to wait at least 4 weeks so I could actually see for sure that it had died off but I'm concerned if this re seeding might be too soon? If the ground elder comes up again in the lawn I'll be back to square one.

He did do a feed and weed treatment on the other areas that I didnt kill last year but that have now got ground elder in them, I pointed this out but he said lets just see how our weedkiller works on it and said not to round up those areas. I feel his weed and feeder wont work and that he probably does not know enough about the ground elder but does a good job feeding weeding etc. He did say my lawn was the worst hed seen in 20 years though, but it had been round upped.

He told me not to remove the moss when round upping the main lawn again but might there be new ground elder shoots under there that would get missed with the spraying? and if its scarified and seeded so soon wouldnt it just end up as before?

Should I ask him to come and scarify the lawn before I round up again then wait till its been killed before re seeding? Although it wont get seeded in April I will just have t make sure its watered in the summer

 

I have the same problem Ladygardener, we have a building plot next door and it just spreads under the hedge, I use roundup too, but a neverending job, wish the owners'd get on with building we've been fighting the ground elder battle for 10 years now.
You do need to make sure it doesn't rain on the treated area for 6 hours after spraying for it to be effective.

 

We used Roundup in hand-sprayer at a previous property to eradicate Ground Elder from the flower beds. It took a couple of years, and we killed a few wanted-plants in the process, but it did work. After we did an initial, careful, time consuming spray using cardboard sheets to protect plants against spray drift etc., we then just used the hand sprayers against anything that re-appeared, spending an hour or so on hands-and-knees every couple of weeks during the growing season.

Dunno about in the lawn though, as we never had that problem, maybe the way we mowed the grass did for it? (We used a cylinder mower and the grass was fine-quality, and cut short - rather than rough, longer, grass.