Monday, June 1, 2009

Wild Strawberry : friend or foe


Wild strawberries, low to the ground, scraggly green, lighter than clover, but the leaves are similar in shape. As you can see from the picture they are taking over my flower bed. These spread like wildfire and whether it is a friend or foe depends on your point of view. I consider it a weed. It is one of those plants that I just have to pull out because it drives me crazy. They say it is an edible wild fruit. The berries are tiny and some say they are delicious except for my neighbor said the fruit was very sour. I haven't tried eating them nor I really care to. The last couple of years I have been pulling them up by hand. Quite frankly, this is quite impossible. You can't pull these fast enough. Something else is needed like a broad leaf herbicide and I am not too keen on that idea as, they are expensive, difficult to apply with accuracy, also drifting or leaching may occur and damage desirable plants. So what am I going to do you ask? My solution for now, will be to pull them all up by hand the sooner the better!

1 comment:

  1. I'm pretty sure that you can simply use a paintbrush and paint on a small amount of Round-up... (paint just a couple of leaves on the plant) it gets right into the leaves and then travels through the entire plant - branches, roots and all - AND it will affect any attached suckers.. so it kills them all dead.
    So, you may only need to "paint" certain plants, and they'll start to die within days.

    It's what I used for the darn blackberries coming up near my fence, and it worked beautifully!

    Good luck!

    ReplyDelete