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29-06-2005, 01:46 PM

wrote:

I'm looking for advice on whether my idea for clearing my back garden
of weeds in feasible.

It all depends how flammable your boundary fences, trees are... and
whether or not there are any local prohibitions on garden fires.

Having left the garden for two years whilst the house has been
extended, we are now ready to remodel the garden. As you can imagine it
is now overgrown with all sorts of weeds and at around 150 square
metre's I'm not going to do it by hand! So in order to bring back
the garden into some kind of state where I can start gardening it
properly, I've devised a cunning plan.

150m^2 isn't too bad to do by hand. A good pair of secateurs, a scythe
and a pruning saw will get most things on a plot that size.

The plan is in two parts. Part one is to dose the whole lot with
lashings of glyphosphate (Roundup 5L with its own sprayer) to kill off
all the weeds including the roots. Part two is to hire a flame gun and
burn off all the now dead vegetation leaving bare soil covered with a
fine dressing of ash.

This will work, although you probably want to buy glyphosate in
concentrated form and have a wand type sprayer to use exclusively for
weedkillers. Let the stuff die off and become tinder dry (about 1 month).

Then make some fire breaks and torch it in suitable sized bonfires. You
will not need a flame gun if you wait until everything is very dry and
ready to burn. You may need buckets of water and a spade to control the
spread of fire. Grass fires spread quickly.

Some weeds are tougher than others. I find buttercup can recolonise
glyphosated rough ground very quickly. You are unlikely to see off
bramble, groundelder, horsetail, bindweed or thistle in a single go.

My concern is that the burning won't remove the dead weeds, but will
leave them charred and very dead but still standing. Some of these are
6-foot tall!

Cut them down and make a bonfire much more control that way.

Would it be better to rotovate the dead weeds after the weedkiller
stage or will the flame gun reduce them to ashes?

Depends on the weeds. Thistle and ground elder thrive on such treatment
you will get one new plant for every 6mm piece of root left in the soil.

Regards,
Martin Brown

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