Help idenitfy this ground vine in our yard!!!

[bostonyard]

Hi Everyone,

Can anyone identify what is quickly creeping in and overtaking our yard?






We abut some undeveloped land and this ground vine is rampant though those woods and is slowly making it's way into our yard. For the past few seasons I've tried to keep it at bay by pulling up the flower and associated vine network. The problem is that the vine is very fragile and I usually end up breaking it and just getting the flower.

Any help with it's identity or how to control it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You

Jake

[rainbowgardener]

Very common lawn weed called ground ivy or creeping charlie. Very difficult to eradicate. Learn to love the little purple flowers?

Otherwise, you need to get good at tracing the vine back to the spots where it is rooted and digging it out at that point. As you have found, pulling on it accomplishes nothing. But even digging it, it is difficult to get ahead of.

Any little bits of the vine left lying around can easily re-root themselves. So if you are fighting the CC in your lawn, it helps to use a lawn mower with a bag catcher, so all the little bits of it don't get spread around. After digging it out, rake out any remnants.

If you have a patch that is mostly all CC, you can smother it out with cardboard, held down with rocks (water the cardboard and then walk on it, so that it is flat against the ground). Leave it for a couple weeks. At that point the CC should be dead and you can replant the area.

[bostonyard]

Thanks for the help, sounds like we have a bit of a battle ahead of us.

[mittengardener]

Thanks for the help, sounds like we have a bit of a battle ahead of us.

This may be blasphemous on this forum, but you could go scorched earth on it and use roundup. Kill everything and then re-seed the area with grass when the poison is gone.

Then again if it is creeping from an adjacent area it'll just end up creeping back in!

[cynthia_h]

Pretty blasphemous, yes; many members plan on edible gardening (veggies, herbs, edible flowers). Round-up/glyphosate/other herbicides aren't usually safe for edibles, and they're *definitely* not safe for the sub-surface organisms we rely on to feed the roots of the plants that feed us. See the forum discussions on Teaming with Microbes, key words like "exudates" or "hyphae"; there are, of course, many others.

The mortal and long-term effects on endangered pollinators, esp. honeybees, also cannot be ignored.

Cynthia H.
Sunset Zone 17, USDA Zone 9