Soothe my despair with your tales of victory over Lesser Celandine

April 12, 2021 9:26 AM

The Lesser Celandine is attempting a takeover of my yard and the woods behind my house. Please tell me I can tackle this problem.

This is the most optimistic article I found in my initial searches, and it just. Sounds so exhausting.

How have you extirpated or at least controlled this obnoxious weed, which spreads via tuber and chokes out all the other early ephemerals? We have noticeable spread from last year, and a gardening neighbor mentioned it to me when I ran into her, so now I feel like I am not being a good steward of the land and people can see.

I think the answer might be some combination of "try not to worry" and "work on the patches that are more limited and then tackle bigger ones" and "assemble a work party of your energetic younger neighbors and perhaps some eager students from the college" but I'm so bummed looking at my yard, which I love.

Does anything eat it? Can I hope that the bees are not starving, and instead are making use of its pollen?

posted by Lawn Beaver to Home & Garden (7 answers total)

I sympathize. Last summer, my neighbors put in a fantastic wood fence. The area by the fence is always full of that stuff, so since we had a dry summer, and that area was pretty beat up during the fence install, I figured it was a good time to try and tackle it.I tilled a 10-foot strip next to the fence. Then I tilled it again and again. Nothing was left except dry dirt. Several weeks later I planted grass. It started coming up and by late fall, there was decent growth. I figured I had beaten it. There was none left, and how could it grow during the winter???

Boy, was I wrong. Last week, it showed up like I had never done anything.
posted by jonathanhughes at 10:04 AM on April 12, 2021

Best answer: Be glad it's not greater celandine, which is also toxic to touch and ugly to boot?

I kid.

You are fighting the good fight here. It isn't of any known use to wildlife, including pollinators. One option is to use weed killer. Another is to smother--cover it with something so that it can't get light. Cardboard with heavy mulch on top might work. If you have a native plant nursery nearby, you could see what might be able to compete with it and plant some of that instead.

Thanks for asking this question--I have a small patch on the edge of my yard and you have steeled my resolve to get rid of it before it gets larger.
posted by chaiminda at 10:21 AM on April 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

RoundUp, applied individually (not sprayed willy-nilly; the classic approach is to wear rubber gloves, then put cotton gloves on top, apply poison to cotton and go around rubbing the leaves of targeted plants). Poisons are problematic, but the non-poison approaches tend to be even more destructive once you're trying to address a large area (eg: lay down light-blocking material to kill everything vs. rip up and sift through topsoil and carefully discard all roots/root pieces of any plant vs. use a couple ounces of chemical applied to specific victims).
posted by aramaic at 11:36 AM on April 12, 2021

Best answer: I'm in the Pacific Northwest. We had a few hundred square feet of this in our yard. We used Roundup maybe 3 years ago in some patches, with many hours of hand pulling in others (for me, like 1 hour per 10-20 sq ft, in areas with other plants mixed in). We've kept at it since then, removing the one plant here and there (close to weekly, during the growing season). There's still some, but it's not the weed that we complain about anymore (that would be Italian arum). As your link says, because the root nodules break off really easily, it's best to do the removal when the soil is moist. It could be useful to sift through the to as much of the root material as you can (I just picked through the dirt with my fingers). I think they don't primarily reproduce by seed, but I would make sure to not let the flowers go to seed if at all possible. It seemed really hopeless back then, but now looking back, I think this plant is not the worst... It doesn't seem to lay dormant for a long time, the root system is very shallow, it mostly spreads only along the ground, and it's not too hard to starve its energy stores.
posted by bread-eater at 1:46 PM on April 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

We just did this! We ended up digging up the whole damn thing several inches down to get beneath the nodes because they were breaking off so much. The soil was so full of the nodes that we just got rid of it all. We didn’t even try sifting.

We did like one of the previous posters and put grass seed over it. Now all we can do is pray.
posted by chatongriffes at 8:28 PM on April 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Try changing the acidity of the soil, using garden lime (CaCO3), this is sold in garden centers for improving your lawn, and will also curb growth of plants that prefer acidic soil such as lesser celandine. But be sure to only use garden lime, to avoid killing of everything or hurting yourself. It will say on the bag how much. I live in Austria so i don't know which brands might be available where you live. I buy the medium price range.

When you dig or pull them up, sprinkle it into the soil. It does not kill them but limits spread.
posted by 15L06 at 2:01 AM on April 13, 2021

Response by poster: Thank you all for your answers, they all have useful suggestions and I appreciate the commiseration.

This past weekend we did some hand pulling and ended up with 4 or 5 very heavy bags - throwing out the dirt seems like a good idea but oof! I don't envy our garbage collectors this week. We targeted patches around our trees and the peonies and lilies out front. In back, we mowed to keep the seed down. There is still so much left, but I'm done worrying, on to the grim set-your-jaw-and-get-on-with-it maintenance phase.

We are not using roundup, but that advice came from everyone I asked in person too, so I will keep it in reserve for next year. Our yard is full of bees, toads, and salamanders, so I want to minimize that approach.

Now the garlic mustard is popping up, but that's just a matter of pulling it wherever I see it.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:50 AM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]