We have a 1/2 acre yard that is divided into 3 areas. I’d love some ideas on how to manage our specific situation. We live in a rural-esque neighborhood where weeds rule and with size of the property, we need it to be doable to maintain.
Area 1: We just xeriscaped. It’s good to go and going to be beautiful once established. The weeding is totally manageable. Yay!
Area 2: Sheet mulched and newly planted trees. This is the high traffic area, kids, dogs. Mulch solved two problems: no more mud, killed the grasses that were generating dangerous grass awns that our dogs were ingesting. Mulching also created a new problem. Bindweed had emerged through the cardboard and thick mulch with vigor.
Area 3: Weed cover, established and newly planted trees. We mow to keep weeds down.
Here are my questions:
Area 2, what do we do about the bindweed, if anything? I’ve read all about it. Seems impossible to control at this scale. Should we get a couple of goats? Or just let it grow as ground cover in this area? Or spend all of our time trying to mitigate?
Area 3, we could continue to mow down the weeds, this works. Or should we add in other ground cover each year to try compete with weeds? Or goats?
Thanks for any thoughts!
by Helpful-Poetry2224
2 Comments
Bindweed: Glyphosate. I’m in your area. We had the same problem. We tried ruthlessly pulling by hand for over a year. Some people will say to do that, but even CSU says to nuke it. It looks to be mostly mulch and the trees are avoidable, so spray low when the flowers are open on a dry, nonwindy day, then pull and trash when dead. It should die right back over the next week or so. We sprayed several years ago, and it has not come back and we’ve since planted the area.
Weeds and trees: I guess that depends on how much work you want to put in up front and what you want the space to be used for. Goats sound delightful, but idk enough about them to know how practical that is. I’m going to assume bindweed is over there too, so if you want to save yourself some steps, maybe spray that area too, then pull the dead weeds and seed something in the fall. Solarization may work if no bindweed. Cover crop after if you need to amend the soil. There are some lower-water turf grass mixes people recommend sometimes on the Denver Gardener sub, or clover or buffalo grass depending on light and traffic. Or keep just mowing weeds. That’s all assuming you want to keep it more open for play. You could also plant other drought-tolerant stuff (ground covers or perennials) if you want a more natural area.
If you want to plant, though, you’ll have to kill the weeds first. They’ll likely outcompete anything you try to establish. I don’t love chemicals, but these western weeds are gnarly and hard to kill when they take over, so I feel like if you get rid of them once, then plant native stuff in their place, it’s a net positive in the long term.
Goats are non-discriminate, and half an acre is a small pasture. They’ll eat all your plants. Goats also only eat above ground, so any roots will remain.
Pigs, however, will till the soil and get to any roots. If you can rent a couple and fence them in the weed area, that might work.