Berks county PA. Completely overrun with THOUSANDS of lambs quarter. I know I can eat them. I’m just not sure what to do. I got about 300 out last weekend only for it to double. I do have milkweed , hysops, and gramnifolia goldenrod still alive but idk any advice would be appreciated. I started a new patch and will deff not leave a lambs quarter in there like I did with this one. Idk
by Mountain_Plantain_75
17 Comments
“weed it”, remove what you don’t want and keep what you DO want. They are growing from last years seeds. It’s not infinite.
Weed and mulch. You can do quick weeding too with a Dutch hoe.
Editing to add: mulch can be anything. Doesn’t have to be wood or bark bought from a store. If it’s a small enough area I’ll just use bagged grass clippings from mowing.
Reduce it down to what you can weed in 3 days – ignore the rest. This might be what you can weed in 5 min, or in 15 min. Whatever you can handle daily.
Weed, over 3 days, that section. Keep weeding daily until you can expand your weed-free patch, going back to the beginning and keeping your first section 100% clear before expanding the zone you are targetting.
The key is persistence, and you really can’t expect it to be a one and done marathon weeding session. 15 min daily is going to be more effective than 1-2 hr in a weekend.
Also, mulch. If you can get arborist wood chips, get them!
I’d think that weeding is a lot easier than starting over. Make sure you plant heavy or mulch once you’ve cleaned it up.
It might be easier to dig up what you want and nuke the site from orbit
Well at least Chenopodium album is probably native and does support native animals. I can confirm I was growing a ton and they seeded yet none came up because of my native strawberry, cut leaf coneflower, asters, and violets got the sun and shaded the area before they could sprout.
Boiled and drained and then Cooked with olive oil, balsamic, and nutritional yeast this is my favorite tasting green as well. Possibly of all time.
[Chenopodium album is a native annual.](https://fsus.ncbg.unc.edu/main.php?pg=show-taxon.php&&plantname=Chenopodium+album&limit=1&offset=0&taxonid=68228) Until your perennials fill in, something will occupy that space. Unlike many invasives, undesirable and ruderal natives like Chenopodium album, Ragweed, Common Violets etc will eventually fade out as your longer lived natives fill in. Remove it a bit around your existing plantings or when you plant other stuff, apply wood chips, and it’ll work out in a few years.
The pokeweeds of the native world are just occupying space preventing invasives from taking over until your more desirable plants fill in. They do not generally prevent establishment of more conservative species. Selectively edit them but also utilize them!
Get a stirrup hoe !!!! you can weed that patch quickly with one
There’s some great advice in here! I just want to add that depending on how established the native plants you’ve added are, over time they will fill in and leave less room for the invasives. In addition to weeding, you could also add more plants to pack it more densely, and then move them later on once they start competing for space. Plants with dense crowns like penstemon digitalis are great for this, especially if there are seeds being blown or washed in from elsewhere. (This is all based solely on my personal experience!)
Don’t give up! You are doing great!
Thirding getting a stirrup hoe, literally the best thing for this. You can get them at Lowe’s, Ace, any hardware place! And then depending on your budget, buy as many plants as you can and put them in. You have a lot of space to fill. You’ll get more bang for your buck if you put some bushes in too. You could also do a chip drop and use that as mulch. During the fall, a lot of nurseries mark down there plants and I find that a great time to stock up.
Here’s a great list of nurseries that sell natives in PA. If you have any Amish near you, I picked up some asters, heliopsis, and phlox for 2.50 each. They were on the side of the road, some divisions from someone’s garden. You can also try Facebook for plants!
[https://nativegardenhub.org/get-native-plants/](https://nativegardenhub.org/get-native-plants/)
You’re alright. These are annuals.
The way I always look at it is that you REMOVE perennials. You CONTROL annuals.
Perennials will stay in your bed, perhaps gradually getting bigger and spreading through rhizomes, so you have to dig the plant out. Sometimes you can’t get all the roots and it takes a bunch of tries. But once you do…it’s gone. So these are the plants it is worth spending time on to pull it dig out.
Annuals will die all by themselves. So ultimately you do not have to remove them. They remove themselves. The trick with controlling annuals is not eliminating them but just don’t ever let them seed. And the other part is that because of the seeds still in the dirt and the seeds that will still continue to blow in…you can kinda never really eliminate annuals.
Perennials are like one mean nasty final boss. Annuals are a never ending series of weak, but pesky drones.
Those Lamb’s Quarters are not even going to remotely stop milkweed, hyssop,or goldenrod. They will grow. It’s just that your garden will look kinda ass.
So basically, the trick with annuals is not to try and remove every last one entirely. It’s to resign yourself that they will always be there, but they don’t have to bother you. Like mowing your lawn or wiping your counters. You’ll always have to do it, but it’s not a particularly cumbersome task. If you get distracted just tidying your room and start trying to deep clean it every week, it will get overwhelming fast.
So the best thing to do with annuals is hoe them down. Use a stirup hoe. And a Japanese weed sickle for more close up work. Just scrape them. Lamb’s Quarter is fairly shallow rooted so quite a few of them will get pulled out and die. But some will survive. It does not matter because you can’t see them. Your garden looks tidy, so who cares what is underneath the dirt?
And if you keep scraping them, eventually they do wear out and die. But even if they don’t they never get a chance to send up flowers, and then winter kills them.
This is the time of year where Lamb’s Quarter germinates. So for a few weeks it’s gonna suck because more seeds are germinating even as you kill the seedlings. But eventually, they run out of germinating seeds for the year and your garden will clear. Also, your perennials will get bigger and crowd them out.
So usually by mid-late summer, annuals are no longer much of a problem. And you concentrate more on pulling the perennials that aren’t quite so easily killed just by scraping top growth off the surface. You gotta get them before they get a late/fall winter to grow a root system.
You probably have about a month before that Lamb’s Quarter starts flowering. And for each one you slice down without killing, you buy yourself maybe another week or 2. So as long as you can hoe down every one currently there in the next month, and then every week or every other week do a quick scrape of the remaining ones then you just keep resetting their clock until they wear out or no longer have time to flower before winter gets them.
Concentrate on doing a half-ass job on 100% of Lamb’s Ear instead of a perfect, kickass job but only getting to 50% of plants. You can hoe a bed super fast once you get the hang of it.
Learning which weeds are worth it to spend time on to pull or dig vs which ones you just hoe out quickly is a big part of learning to garden.
Also, your plants are thuggish enough that I would bet they outcompeted lambs quarter in a couple of years. They’ll pack so tight that hoesing will no longer be possible, but it will hopefully also no longer be necessary. You’ll get baby weeds still and for a few weeks in spring it will look bad as your perennials have not covered them yet. After that, they either get shaded out, or they are low growing and hidden by the natives so you don’t see them.
Hello neighbor Lancaster County here!👋🍻
Don’t give up! Keep fighting the good fight. Every year I battle Japanese stiltgrass. The last 2 or 3 years I started planting more plants in groups of 3-5plants and also leaving leaves in my beds. It seems to be working for me. It still shows up but not like it used to. I used to have a spot with lots of lambs quarters but the violets pushed them out.
Your bed will eventually fill out with time and push the weeds out.
My vegetable garden was completely overrun with lamb’s quarters last year after I foolishly let one go to seed the previous fall. It was at least as much as you have here. I just ate it as one of my primary vegetables all spring and summer. That was enough to pretty much take care of it. It really is delicious sautéed or in soups, casseroles, etc. I have pretty much none coming up this year and now I almost miss it.
That can be knocked out in 20 mins
Dutch hoe
If you have the funds I would pull it up and then plant a bunch of native plugs that day, then mulch around everything you want. You could also try just laying a couple layers of cardboard and mulch on top and not buying more plants.
Isn’t lambs quarters annual? Just mow it this year and don’t let it seed.