On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 21:26:27 +0000, P Williamson wrote
(in message ):

Simply paint the liquid roundup not spray. I occassionally spray roundup
around woody stems of various plants to get rid of pernicious weeds and have
had no problems - just dont wave the spray wand about, spara larger droplets
and don't do it if there is a breath of wind.

You need to be killing the bindweed on a continual basis and all other things
being equal, in theory you can win the war if you stop the plant from getting
enough top growth to sustain the roots. The difficulty I have with doing
this is that it is necessary to keep up the treatment and not relent, not
stop for a while, etc- just keep on attacking it to stop it thriving, not
even a little bit of thriving!- it, for as long as it takes. But there is
more than one way to attack it.

What you could do in addition to spraying/painting with glyphosphate, and
after you'd had made some good progress with that, would be to to use heavy
black polythene sheeting to cover the ground for some distance around this
location, allowing only the roses through. You could tape it carefully with
some sort of weatherproof tape around the rose stems so that other than your
roses, nothing gets through. The right kind of polythene allows water through
(your roses wouldn't survive otherwise) and blocks light. The bindweed cannot
get through the opaque polythene and so it gets no light. With no light it
cannot live indefinitely- its chemical processing depends on light reaching
the leaves- so after a while (could be a couple of years) it will give up, at
least in that location. Various places in the UK stock polythene sheeting for
this purpose.

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