Topic: mares-tail

[Esplanade]

the kibosh (now called Kirtail) weedkiller is a professional product and is non-selective. ie it will kill all green material that it is in contact with. Its £28 a bottle and I wouldnt entertain it. The progreen company say that you will have to re-apply each year anyway.

Horsetail (Marestail is an aquatic plant and is mis-named)

dont try to dig it out - you'll not succeed.

dont rotovate if you have HT - you'll chop it up 100-fold and kill the allotment for ever.. for the next person after you give up because of the HT.

Vinegar will acidify the soil. Boiling hot water is best, try keeping a big pot on the boil over a small charcoal fire and nuke the whole site in one day? when it comes back - simply pull out the tops before they get to more than 5cms (2 inches old money) else it will photosynthesise and send nutrients back to the Rhizome. If you can do this for approx 8 months without fail - you will starve the Rhizome. Leave it to long before pulling the tops (eg leave to grow to 7cms or more) and you will have to start again. Its a networking root system and it will learn not to come back on your plot if it is being starved there..it will travel under the sub-soil and come up elsewhere.

The answer to ultimately remove it is in putting back deep goodness into the soil - the reason why the HT appeared in the first place.


Compost the dead HT leaves for 2 years - to put back the silica that the HT has removed from the soil.

[Jokerman]

Wiki - the fountain of all knowledge says:

''If eaten in large quantities, the foliage of some species is poisonous to grazing animals, including (somewhat ironically given its common name) being poisonous to horses.[9] On the other hand, the young fertile stems bearing strobili of some species are cooked and eaten by humans in Japan, although considerable preparation is required and care should be taken.[10] The dish is similar to asparagus and is called tsukushi.[11] The people of ancient Rome would also eat meadow horsetail in this manner, but they also used it to make tea as well as a thickening powder.[12] Indians of the North American Pacific Northwest eat the young shoots of this plant raw.[13] The leaves are used as a dye and give a soft green colour. An extract is often used to provide silica for supplementation. Horsetail was often used by Indians to polish wooden tools. Equisetum species are often used to analyze gold concentrations in an area due to their voracious ability to take up the metal when it is in a solution.[12]''

[Toshofthe Wuffingas]

I've had my allotment two months now and apart from the raspberry bed, I have not tolerated a single shoot to grow. A spade goes vertically in close by and the soil loosened and I pull up up to six inches of bootlace root. I do it on the paths too. If it does eventually get ahead of me, it will have wasted a couple of months without getting any photosynthesis at least. The roots dry out on a bit of tin. With its silica, it might be useful as a pottery glaze.

[bionear2]

You can use a bunch of it like a brillo pad.

In days of yore, bunches of marestail were to be found in country kitchens, to use as pot scourers. Have used it in the field to clean aluminium mess-tins, works a treat!

[busy_lizzie]

This problem comes up time and time again. Mares Tail is a ancient weed and was even around in Roman times. The roots go way down and have been found in mine shafts, so the chances of digging it out forever are impossible. We have had our plot for nine years now and some of our plot was covered in it when we first got it. They way we deal with it is to just keep digging it out with as long a root as possible. As they pop their heads up dig them up and you will weaken the root. Over the years this is what we have done, and they seem to come up less and less. We don't have a problem with them now, and just continue to chop them off when we see them. I think there are more troublesome weeds, like bind weed and couch grass. We have never found the need to go the chemical route, so I couldnt give advice if this is the way you want to deal with it. busy_lizzie 

[Robert_Brenchley]

Horsetails predate the dinosaurs by a very long way. They're not going to go away!