This herbaceous plant, with its beautiful carved leaves and open white umbels, is familiar to many vegetable gardeners and horticulturists.
Some people specifically grow strawflower on their plots and then use it for culinary and medicinal purposes, while others consider this plant a dangerous weed.
Anastasia Kovrignyh, an agronomist and landscape designer, explained how to get rid of weeds.
The young shoots of this plant, which have a pleasant taste and useful properties, can of course be added to soups and salads and used in various home preparations.
However, over time, the stems become tough and turn into an aggressive weed.
A modest, frost-resistant, shade-tolerant plant with a vigorous, strongly branched, creeping rhizome that grows rapidly, it aggressively takes over new, more fertile areas of land.
Weeds are such a bother in the vegetable garden! They just keep spreading and covering the beds, sucking up all that healing moisture and nutrients from the soil. It’s so frustrating!
And it’s not just a nuisance. Weeds that grow in large numbers on site often attract a variety of pests and become a hotbed for dangerous diseases. This can really inhibit the growth of vegetable and flower crops.
Combat methods
If there are thickets of stinkweed on the site, then quickly getting rid of this weed will be helped by a variety of agro-technical measures, which may include mowing, pruning and manual weeding.
It is advisable to cut off the stubbles growing in the middle of flower and vegetable crops with garden shears or a very sharp knife, followed by loosening the soil around the crops.
The area should be weeded before the weed leaves have burst into flower, as the weed is not in the ground.
Any skunk weed shoots found during weeding should be removed from the soil immediately and sent to the compost heap or buried.
Garden plants growing in beds can be protected from skunks and other weeds by using a brown or black covering material.
In this way, all cultivated plants will develop and grow faster, and weed shoots will die without sunlight and fresh air.
Before applying the covering material, the soil must be thoroughly dug up, all stones and weed roots must be removed, the topsoil must be carefully levelled and then the soil must be covered with the covering material.
Weeds are rarely found in areas covered with mulch containing shredded bark, small sawdust, conifer felling or shredded straw.
Mulch not only prevents weeds from spreading further throughout the plot, but also protects plants with shallow root systems from viral and fungal diseases, pests and the scorching sun.
The fastest, most effective and reliable way to control stubble and other weeds is to treat the site with herbicides.
Such products are recommended if large weed thickets have developed on the property.
Systemically active herbicides not only cause weed mortality but also prevent the spread of new weeds.
Solutions based on these products are also recommended for the management of greenhouses, outbuildings, residential buildings and areas around fences.
