Here is the first attempt at creating a bindweed-free growing zone. These strawberries were completely choked out by the weed.
This was a slightly-raised bed for strawberries. While they were doing great this spring, the bindweed took over and completely covered them. I couldn’t get it off the plants fast enough. By this point trying to pull the vine off the plants meant either losing leaves in the process because the vine was wrapped so tightly around each plant, or spending several minutes trying to carefully find and untangle each plant.
The Plan
After several attempts to pull out all the weed and put down newspaper and wood chips, it became obvious we didn’t have the time to keep weeding the strawberries, and the weed seemed to keep coming back faster with each attempt. So I decided to completely relocate the strawberries.
Here we are creating the new strawberry home. I decided to use weed barrier to cover the bottom of the raised bed and buy new soil to fill the raised bed with. This way I could finally have a weed-free zone to enjoy! That was the thought at least.
I dug up each strawberry plant and removed all the dirt, basically turning it into a bare-root plant, before putting it into its new home. Why? In this picture you can see the plant and by my pinky finger, running down into the roots is a white bindweed root.
After getting this new raised bed completed, and enjoying it for a week or so, we left for a 10-day long vacation.
When we returned I saw something that made me so mad, disappointed, frustrated all at the same time – bindweed! Growing in my suppose-to-be weed-free raised bed! I pulled the little plants thinking maybe they were stray roots I had missed. But they keep coming, everywhere. And I finally started digging deep to try to find the source.
This is what I found. A ball of bindweed entangled with torn weed-barrier pieces at the bottom of the raised bed.
Conclusion: Weed barrier is a FAIL.
Which leads to Trial 2: Using boiling water
