Finding the best control method for each weed
Submitted By: sgraham
Location: Bega Valley, NSW
Land Type: Rural Retreat
Affected by Severe Weather?: Floods
What weed/s are you managing?
Fireweed, fleabane, thistles, cobbler’s peg, stinking roger (all annuals in the daisy family)
What is your weed management strategy?
Use the control method that works best for each weed, this includes hand-pulling, spraying, cutting with a battery operated whipper-snipper or chipping them out with a hoe (for thistles which cannot be grabbed by hand)
What have you learnt about managing weeds this way?
Destroying native vegetation
What have been the benefits and drawbacks?
Fireweed is one of those weeds that it is best to get onto straight away because once it becomes established it is very hard to get rid of. The same is true of all these weeds, but fireweed gets to the point of producing seed much quicker than the others. In this area there are a few native Senecio species that look a bit like fireweed, so you need to be sure you know what the weed looks like before wasting a lot of time removing natives.The general advice is to pull out the whole plant, bag it and dispose of it carefully. We’ve had success by pulling out the plant, stripping the flowers/seeds and putting the plant on top of a tussock, or somewhere like that where its roots cant get back in contact with the ground. We put the seeds in a paper bag, which we then burn in the wood stove at night. It’s a lot easier to do that than to cart around bags full of fireweed plants. We do a similar thing for fleabane, which seems to do well after summer rain. We pull up the plant, rip the heads off, bag the heads and put them on the fire at home. In some years it has been a lot of effort to do that, but then subsequent seasons were quite weed-free, so it was probably worthwhile. However, after two La Niña years the fleabane is back with a vengeance, so it is all to do again. But the result of not removing them would be too awful to contemplate. Where plants are really thick the battery powered whipper-snipper with a plastic blade has been good value for cutting them down before they flower. This might have to be done 2 or 3 times over the course of the summer, rather than just once if you pull them, as they do resprout off the cut stump, but it does give a quick result.
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