Anonymous wrote:RoundUp everything on the hill. Go heavy with the application. Kill it all, you can’t leave anything left alive.
When it’s brown (2 weeks usually), use a string trimmer to clear it down to bare dirt.
Cover hill with perennial wildflower seed mix. Cover with 1” layer of garden soil.
Water daily. Within 6-8 weeks the hill will be covered with new growth, and it will be dense enough to resist invasive weeds.
Anonymous wrote:Short version - after hand-pulling weeds is there anything not super terrible for the earth that I can put down to lessen the chance that invasive plants will re-occur?
Long version - We moved into our home two years ago and have slowly been trying to tackle and insane backyard. Thankfully I was able to get the bamboo up over the last two years because it had only started to creep over from a neighbor. We put in a barrier for that.
Now I'm trying to tackle lots of poison ivy and invasive garlic mustard and some sort of other insane invasive plant that grows by rhizome. I learned last year I am very allergic to poison ivy so this year I hired someone to pull basically everything back there (keeping the good may apples and ferns). I understand that I can have people come hand-pull weeds repeatedly to tame this hillside. I am nervous to do any work myself given the poison ivy. Other than Round Up, is there anything I should put on the hillside after the next round of hand-pulling? Thanks for ideas.
Anonymous wrote:You could cover the hill side with a weed-blocking fabric, stake down the fabric, cover with mulch, and then make small holes to insert plants of your choosing, like a creeping juniper
Anonymous wrote:Do a dense planting of desirable plants - buy them as big as you can afford. It won’t eliminate the weeds completely but dense planting is the best way to crowd them out. Knowing nothing about the site, evergreen shrubs might be a good choice but it depends on the sun/soil.
Doing round up and leaving the hillside bare is a mistake because a) weeds will move right back in and b) erosion.