In article ,
kauhl-meersburg wrote:
that's just the reason I have posted the question that mowing before
blooming didn't help, young shoots appeared manifold like cutting osier,
so my method for this year will be rip out the individuals together with
their roots, not great work as the plants can easily be seen and time is
enough till blooming stadium -

Yes, mowing before blooming is counterproductive. You get shorter
plants with more inflorescences at bloom time! That's why I like to
cut them when they are well into bloom -- most of the the plant's
resources are concentrated in the tops, and in a short season climate
they don't have enough time to regenerate enough to store enough to
survive the winter.

Digging the plants will help a lot, but if it gets to be too much work,
or too destructive to adjacent plants, you can try cutting the stalks
at ground level with pruning shears, and perhaps applying a little
herbicide. I don't know which herbicide would work best. Goldenrod
develops a very strong root system, and the plants aren't easy to get
out.

you are right the golden rod takes profit of abandoned land and in my
case where I only undertake mowing those mostly damp areas only once a
year that's an optimal rythm for it -
taking care of those abandoned land is part of measures for preservation
of wild nature / rare species and assistance of middle and late
blooming flowers induces this socalled one-shearing -

Most of the ground cover in open areas around here is introduced
Eurasian flora, both escaped pasture species and weeds. So I should
be preserving the goldenrod and fighting almost everything else!

until now I considered blackberry as winner of plant concurrency, but
referring to golden rod the game is still open -

The most persistent weeds I have in my urban garden are Campanula
rapunculoides (I call it the Bellflower From Hell), garlic mustard
(Alliaria officinalis), burdock (Arctium lappa), beggar's ticks
(Bidens vulgata) and twitch grass (Agropyron repens). In the lawn
I combat dandelions (Taraxacum officinalis) and plantain (Plantago spp),
and have lost the battle with creeping charlie (Glechoma hederacea).
All of these are non-natives here.

One of the worst, most invasive and uncontrollable plants here is
bishop's goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria) which seems to be able to
compete with anything, lawn or forest floor, and is almost ineradicable.
And Lythrum salicaria (purple loosestrife) is practically obliterating
our wetlands, replacing native vegetation with solid masses of plants
which support none of the native animals or their prey.

what was totally new for me that this plant also deteriorates the soil
as consequence of root exudates, resulting like dense wood soil, fatal
for all other flowers -

It does develop a solid mass of tough woody roots. I haven't noticed it
preventing other plants from growing near it except by normal competition.
I hadn't heard about allelopathic root exudates in this plant. Do you
have more information about that?

so thank you very much for your sympathy and colleagual greetings from a
fan of flowers and insects

Good luck to you. Let us know how it goes.

Btw, goldenrod here doesn't appear to be afflicted by any particular
pest or disease, as far as I know (and I don't know much). I see the
occasional spittle bug and sometimes some aphids, but generally the
plants are very healthy. I think its ecological role here is as a
successional species for newly open areas. The climax ecosystem of
southern Ontario is mixed forest, a series of transition zones between
the Carolinian Forest and the Boreal Forest. There's a little
Carolinian Forest in the extreme southwest and along the northwest
shore of Lake Erie, but north of Lake Ni****ing, it's pretty much solid
taiga. It's very interesting to see which species "drop out" of the
flora where, and how the plant habit and habitat change as species
approach the limits of their ranges. I suppose there at Lake Constance
you can just climb a mountain and see an entire sequence like this
in a very small distance!

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