T wrote:
....smothering...
I tried that on some little trees I am truing to get rid
of. First I cut them back to the ground. Then I placed
a big old piece of cardboard on top of them with a big
old rock to keep it in place. The SOB's just grew out
around the cardboard. These were 2' x 2' pieces
of cardboard!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

little trees coming back from seeds or coming up
from roots or what? is it a bush? do you know what
it is?

cardboard is cheap enough and it can always be
put down in bigger pieces and a few layers and
overlap the seams so light doesn't get through.

one thing nice about it though is that it is
also an organic material which will eventually
end up as worm/plant food. in your rocky soil
you might have a hard time burying what bits of
it are left, but to keep them from blowing away
....

in one low spot here what i did was cover the
cardboard with chunks of bark that a friend gave
me from his firewood splitting. so it just looked
like a layer of bark being used as a mulch. after
the 2nd season i had to refresh the cardboard so
i did that, but that gave me four years of weed
free coverage for an area that was otherwise always
a lot of work to keep after all the weeds that
would sprout there. as a low spot any seeds from
the surrounding areas would get washed into there
or blown there.

recently we came into 550 engineering bricks so
we've covered the entire low area there with
landscape weed barrier and then put the bricks
down so i won't have to redo the cardboard any
more and we have a brick path from and to nowhere
but it is a good temporary spot to store and use
the bricks until we decide to do something else
with them.


Next attempt, I am going to try to girdling the branches.

if you're going through all that just cut them
off with some loppers. they work really well and
are not that expensive. i have a pair that i can
use to chop off branches up to three inches thick
and they don't need any electric power or anything
do use them, just a little muscle power. i
use them to keep any sprouting trees out of the
north hedge and to trim branches or to cut up
brush into smaller pieces. very handy. i use
them quite often as we have a lot of honeysuckle
bushes that can use trimming.


I really, really, really do not want to use round up on them.

Oh and they are completely immune to cussing at them!

what you could be doing with them is letting
them grow and then cut them off and using that
organic matter as a top mulch to hold in moisture.
eventually they well break down and turn into
humus (in an arid climate that's going to take a
lot longer than here so you should get a few years
out of them).

around here pieces of wood laying on the ground
last several years. where they are weeds aren't -
ok, well weeds will grow around or through them in
places. i still like them left as larger pieces
instead of going through the effort of chipping
them (some people buy wood chippers to deal with
brush and leaves, but i want the organic materials
here to last as long as possible so i never have
chipped anything and don't want the added expense
and maintenance of yet another machine to deal
with).


songbird