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Can anyone identify this weed?

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seepy83

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Located in CT. It has a root system that shoots out horizontally and spreads. It's in an area where there are a lot of nice plants that I don't want to kill, so I'm looking for a way to get rid of this without using something like RoundUp or removing a lot of soil/mulch and covering the area with landscaping fabric. They probably get 3-4 feet tall by the middle of the summer.
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Johnson grass... in a nutshell... you are doomed. Most resilient plant, there are no weed killers that can kill them. I even sprayed herbicide but even that keep them out for too long.
Apparently tilling the land is the only option. Even is a tiny bit of root is left behind anywhere it will start all over again. Only good news is, roots don't go too deep
 
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DesiPower said:
Johnson grass... in a nutshell... you are doomed. Most resilient plant, there are no weed killers that can kill them. I even sprayed herbicide but even that keep them out for too long.
Apparently tilling the land is the only option. Even is a tiny bit of root is left behind anywhere it will start all over again. Only good news is, roots don't go too deep
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🙁

I had a feeling that was going to be the situation. The stuff is so invasive that it seems like the only solution is to dig up the area and start over. Too bad...
 
Definitely Johnson Grass.
You can pry them out of the ground, but if you pull them, they break off and grow back.

At my old house, I had TruGreen treat it. They wiped each plant with an herbicide on a sponge. A week later, it was all dead... along with a 1ft diameter patch of dead everything else. My lawn has 1ft dead spots everywhere.
It took all summer but it finally all filled back in.

You can try Round Up, squirted at each base. I tried that before calling TruGreen.
It worked ok, but not good enough.

It is a very bad and resilient plant.
 
I have it in 2 flower beds mixed in with and destroying my nice plants...probably a total area of 600-700 sq ft. I'm going to try to hand weed it and pull out as much of the root system as possible. I might resort to Round Up later in the year, but I hate to use that around desirable plants.
 
another question: does anyone know if dandelion's white "snowflakes" (looks like a big white ball) will spawn new dandelions if it spreads across the lawn? Or is this a myth? Are they seeds?
 
rh71 said:
I did read that but it was somewhat confusing. From what I understand there, the yellow flower head seems to be what turns into the white ball, but then they don't talk about what happens to it (the dandelion snow).

I'm curious about this because I just mowed a whole bunch of dandelion snows and the next day new ones came back, with no yellow flower head stage in between.
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From a picture caption on that page:
A dandelion flower head composed of hundreds of smaller florets (top) and seed head (bottom)
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So, I believe the seed heads and flower heads grow separately. The Flower does not turn into a seed head.
 
DesiPower said:
Only good news is, roots don't go too deep
Click to expand...

If it pulled up as easy as it looks like in your pics, consider it a blessing. Every 2-3 days, just go through where it is infected and weed out the affected areas. Last year, (and hopefully not this year) I had a nasty infection in my front yard from a Silver Poplar tree that insisted on creating new roots shoots. To kill the thing, I was using a shovel and digging out tree roots from the ground. I would cry tears of joy to be able to easily pull out weeds with just my bare fingers. Regardless, good luck with all that.

Burn the uprooted weeds or place in a lawn bag for curbside collection. I would NOT throw these weeds in a compost pile.
 
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