Cleavers / Goosegrass

Citizenpain

Anyone have any tips on controlling cleavers ? It’s running rampant in my boundary hedge this year. Does it do any harm ?
Tks

magicbastarder

doesn't do any harm per se, as far as i know, but you can make soup with it i believe, which tastes a bit like pea soup.

hirondelle

Citizenpain wrote: »

Anyone have any tips on controlling cleavers ? It’s running rampant in my boundary hedge this year. Does it do any harm ?
Tks

It is quite satisfying to pull it out of a hedge I think!

The main thing is just to keep removing it before the seeds ripen on it- it is an annual, so no seeds, no weeds.

tromtipp

Hand weeding - and a resolve to get there early in future and remove it when it's tiny. It can damage shrubs and tall flowers just by weighing them down - the garden writer Christopher Lloyd said somewhere that he'd seen more borders destroyed by goosegrass than by bindweed, which seems somewhere between exaggerated and unlikely, given that it's an annual and will have died back by August in most cases. That said, it seeds widely, the seeds get dispersed on fur and feathers, and can survive viable in the soil for years.

The seeds are much the same size as a cereal grain, and don't always get removed in the screening process so if you ever have a little round nubbly thing in your porridge it's probably a goosegrass seed - rice sized, roughly egg shaped with a large dimple in one side. Perfectly safe to eat btw, but not very nourishing or delicious.

I developed allergic dermatitis at one stage, and it was my main trigger - probably because of the little hooks. I have cried from the pain - far worse than nettles. Then I gave up wheat because it made me cough, and a series of other allergies, including the goosegrass one, went away. But I'm still dealing with the seed bank that built up over the few years I wasn't controlling it properly. SO satisfying now to spot a plant I've missed at the seedling stage, and unroll metres of shoots to get to the one tiny but tough rooted stem and pull in out.

Take THAT!

tromtipp

ps, if it's in the hedge, a long-handled claw tool will be enough to let you reach in and break the roots at the base - hand weeding is more for the borders with softer plants.

Citizenpain

6-8 foot border hedge running 100metres . I’ll need to drink a lot of cleavers tea. It’s growing behind it so hard to get at .
Thanks folks

magicbastarder

tromtipp wrote: »

because of the little hooks

oh yeah, forgot to mention that. they can be surprisingly raspy little b******s.