morning glory sprouts

[flowerbug]

Really? Man they go bonkers here. They self seed and will create a carpet of freshly germinated heart shaped leaves. Then its a drag race to the sky! They are super aggressive. Must be a Michigan thing. We do have a really nice micro climate with the Great Lakes protecting us. My neighbor has them self seed and germinate along her fence every year without fail. They look really pretty in bloom and from afar they are hard to hate.

Till they are climbing on things choking out your clematis, or going up a tree, or trampoline, or tomato cages and just making a nuisance of themselves. They are as tough and dandelions here and just as prolific.

the rabbits and deer seem to like them. many times when i'm weeding that pathway to clear them out again i find a lot of them chewed off. it's been around 4 or 5yrs since we let any of them bloom around that fence for long. so those seeds are remaining viable in the crushed limestone, through winters, hot summers, etc. the only place i would ever plant them in the future would be around something i knew i was going to keep mowed regularly.

there's now about five different main infestations i'd love to clear completely, but Mom still likes them here or there. arg... no more on the fences though. i take those out no matter what.

 

[thistlebloom]

It may also have to do with WHAT KIND of Morning Glory you are working with.

This. ^

 

[flowerbug]

This. ^

commonly sold decorative types in both cases. so far. the wild type we had try to take over a garden in the front didn't have nearly as many flowers and seeds but it was still a tough bugger to remove. it took several years of vigilence to get it all out of there. i don't let the much smaller white morning glory that grows along the road get established anywhere in the gardens or lawn here.

 

[thistlebloom]

commonly sold decorative types in both cases. so far. the wild type we had try to take over a garden in the front didn't have nearly as many flowers and seeds but it was still a tough bugger to remove. it took several years of vigilence to get it all out of there. i don't let the much smaller white morning glory that grows along the road get established anywhere in the gardens or lawn here.

The 'much smaller MG'.. are you talking about bindweed?

 

[flowerbug]

The 'much smaller MG'.. are you talking about bindweed?

correct. isn't that in the same plant family?

 

[Ridgerunner]

I'll copy something from Wikipedia just to show it is a pretty big family. Plus you need to be a bit careful when using a common name. Morning Glories can mean different things to different people. We do that a lot with common names on here, not necessarily always talking about the same thing.

Ipomoea (/ˌɪpəˈmiːə, -poʊ-/[2][3]) is the largest genus in the flowering plant family Convolvulaceae, with over 500 species. It is a large and diverse group with common names including morning glory, water convolvulus or kangkung, sweet potato, bindweed, moonflower,[4] etc.

The most widespread common name is morning glories, but there are also species in related genera bearing the same common name.

Bindweed flowers will be white. Morning Glory flowers can be a lot of different colors, including white. The Morning Glories I dislike have different colored flowers. I am not talking about bindweed as the flowers are not all white. Where I've encountered them they are annuals, I don't know if they could survive a tropical or maybe semi-tropical winter. They grow rapidly, climb on anything they can reach and produce a lot of branch vines. They can overwhelm plants in the garden. They produce a lot of beautiful bright flowers that don't last long, maybe a day. But there will be new flowers the next day, a lot of new ones. Each flower will produce a few fairly large hard seeds that can last years in the soil before they sprout.

My earliest memories of Morning Glories with their brightly colored flowers are trying to keep weeds out of a 3/4 acre tobacco crop or a 2 acre corn crop. Dad would plow between rows with a horse drawn plow, usually a triple foot but occasionally a double shovel, and we would use hoes to clean the plants out of the individual rows. Corn was worse. Once the tobacco reached a certain size it self-mulched. There was not enough light getting to the ground for seeds to sprout. I also remember trying to keep them out of the vegetable garden, especially the way they'd wrap around tomato plants.

I have them sprouting along my back fence a lot. The neighbor across the fence does not control them at all but anything that sprouts or comes on my side is treated like a weed. Some people on this forum have said they like them as a flower. I understand that and will not say anything to the neighbor about them. That is their business. But they will not thrive on my side of the fence.

 

[flowerbug]

@Ridgerunner *nods* ayep... i'm fighting them as much as i'm fighting the wild grape vines, i don't want either of them to get so overwhelming that they'll take down the fences, but i have seen them take down trees. i have one dying tree in the north hedge now that is being overtaken by the wild grapes. i need to get in there this fall with the loppers to cut the vines.

 

[Jared77]

I've even gone so far as to cut the grape stems and touch a little bit of Round Up to the freshly cut area. That will circulate it back to the plant and kill it to the roots.

I really don't want to use chemicals, but as aggressive as wild grape can be it forces my hand.

 

[flowerbug]

if you want full effect from glyphosate you should apply it to as many leaves as possible so that it gets absorbed and sent to the roots. grape vines have very extensive root systems as they get older... painting a little on a cut stem isn't going to have nearly the effect you might need (unless it is a very tiny plant, which at that case you can remove it by hand)...

 

[Zeedman]

I have childhood memories of the bright blue morning glories covering the side of a neighbor's house, they always fascinated me. When I first moved into our house 20 years ago, I planted some purple ones by a light pole in the front yard. They densely covered the pole, and then some. The next year, though, there were HUNDREDS of volunteer seedlings in the surrounding area. I suppose that's a good thing, if you want morning glories in the same place every year; but there was a nearby garden I didn't want them to get into, so I killed them. And killed them. And killed them. It took two years before they stopped coming up in large numbers.

The water convolvulus (a.k.a water spinach) is a tasty cooked green, I grow it every year as a vegetable... and that is the only "morning glory" I will ever grow. It won't even flower in this latitude, much less set seed. It is a noxious weed in subtropical areas, though.