Kay Lancaster wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jul 2007 21:58:09 -0500, helco wrote:
turn red? Clover? A patch of land that adjoins my yard has gone
untended for over a year now, and I've been wading in there to pull the
plants that are making seeds (getting scratched up by rampant
raspberries in the process). I'd like to put them in the compost (we're
talking a lot of biomass), but I'm already being overrun by those weeds
in my own yard because of last summer's neglect, and I don't want more.

Don't blame last year's weeds in the neighboring lot for germinating weed seeds
in your lawn this year. Chances are, the stuff that's germinating this
year has been there for quite a while, waiting for an opening in the
lawn canopy to germinate. Easiest way to prevent lawn weeds is to grow
thick grass mowed at the proper height for the species.

Sorry I didn't make the situation clearer. The weeds are in my flower
beds, not in the lawn. Aside from limiting the reseeding, I'm
attempting to keep some control in the neighbor's area, too. She's been
widowed and has never worked in the yard at all, so there's now a
bramble that's five feet high in some places, twelve feet across.
(Rabbits love it.) The lawn gets mowed, but that's it. I'm pulling out
hundreds of baby ginko trees, mulberry trees, wild plums, Virginia
creeper ... and I figure as long as I have all this stuff I might as
well put what I can into my compost -- but if the seeds are going to
continue to ripen after the plant has been cut, I won't include them --
they'll go in a separate pile with the creeping charlie, the bindweed,
the grass. The main seeds I'm worried about are pokeweed and
nightshade. So -- will pokeweed and nightshade (and clover) seeds
continue to ripen if they're still very green when the plant is cut?

helco