Bindweed

[MikeFromLFE]

Looks like the new plot is starting to yield a splendid crop of bindweed.
I've tried spot spraying with glyphosate, but it's growing faster than I can spray (ooh er missus!) and I've resorted to picking it out as it appears.

Any advice for medium / long term eradiaction of the bloody stuff?
What is the safest course of action with the roots that I've collected - I'm nervous of composting them?

(I'm happy to use any chemicals short of radionucleides - mainly because I don't want my carrots talking back at me).

[Riggers]

Burn the buggering buggers I say. Don't compost the blasted stuff. I'd hesitate to use chemicals, but maybe that's just me.

[Charlotte]

[Paul D]

We've pulled/sifted/screamed at tonnes of the stuff since we started sorting out our overgrown garden.

Composting was never an option, we've either burnt it or taken it to the tip (literally car loads of the effing stuff).

I have yet to hear of a way of stopping it short of Pathclearing your entire garden down to nothingness. Even then I'd wager the first thing to reappear in the future would be bindweed.

[andyoxon]

+1 to Charlotte's method...

...but, given the wider implications of nuclear devastation, I'd try a combination of...

1. stems with leaves tied together in a clear plastic bag (reasonably substantial) containing glyphosate...  Not too much glyphosate, because sometimes the leaves are simply chemically burnt and don't seem to then take up optimal  levels.  
edit.  After a few days of glyphosate treatment you could try & introduce some Verdone*, as a double hit.  Glyphosate first, to allow good growing conditions & normal plant metabolism to carry Gly. to the roots), verdone - with synthetic auxins to stimulate over growth & plant death...
* Verdone Extra 800 Ml Ready To Use Lawn Weedkiller: Amazon.co.uk: Garden & Outdoors

And,
2. continued physical removal of plants and as much root as possible; because in the end glyphosate just doesn't appear to be fully effective.

A couple of years ago I managed to get rid* of uber weed - ground elder from the front of house border, by virtually sifting the soil, removing any root particles, getting rid of clumps of plants harboring the GE (in bags to the local tip), removing a section of lawn against this border, removing any GE plants that did reappear/applying glyphosate...

* touches some wood...

On another note, beware of accepting pots of plants from other peoples gardens.  At our last house I managed to get an 'infestation' of lesser celandine from a pot of perennials from my parents...

[henshaw11]

Move house !

All we ever managed to do was just keep it under control with regular weeding and trying to follow the root back, didn't really want to use chemicals since it was beneath border hedges, etc - where we couldn't put it all out without leaving some fragments.

Ours went on the compost at the council tip, but at least there it's guaranteed to be composted properly, rather than sit lurking as it might in your own compost heap.

[Feline]

Interestingly my front and back garden were badly afflicted with bindweed when I moved in in 1998. I waged war on it in the back garden by pulling out as much of it complete with roots as I could on a weekly basis, until it simply gave up the ghost and just stopped coming back. I think I was more tenacious than it was, and the interval between my weeding seemed to give it just enough time to use up all its energies sending up new shoots only to have me remove them again causing it to lose the will to live. This method was time consuming though.

In my front garden I don't spend so much time weeding and so I simply laid a weed proof membrane around all the shrubs and covered it in bark chippings. Very occasionally a few stalks of the stuff appear in a plant and I just pull it out. I think I have just about won the war 

We also had mare's tail in the front and that has also now gone.

[spindrift]

I've got an infestation and am currently just pulling them up.

I have heard people make a trellis, a pyramid of bamboo poles, let the bind weed get established and then paint it with glysophate.

[MikeFromLFE]

Right, got it sorted  

Bloke with an Irish accent and a white pick-up came round and offered me a load of "Fukushima Buliders Waste" - at least that's what I think he called it - said he'd seen on t'internet I'd got a weed problem (I'm not sure which forum he's been looking at).
Anyway - I've layered this stuff on the allotment plot, and the bindweed has gone. Well, what's coming up doesn't really look like bindweed, it's got sort-of 'Hello Kitty' faces on the leaves, and sort of 'sings to me'.
BTW : One of the allotment cats seems to be growing a second tail. Strange what you see on the plot.
Maybe I have got a weed problem after all.