Anyone Seeing Tons of "Smartweed" This Year?

[andy10917]

Yup - I think your ID's are correct. Don't feel alone with the previous identifications - many people make the mistake.

The best approach for both is a multiyear, two-pronged regimen - a combination of a pre-emergent like Prodiamine, and the Acclaim Extra (for Stiltgrass) and maybe Triclopyr for Smartweed.

[flyingfish88]

thanks for the ID help! this is why this forum is great. I can probably hand pull the small amount stiltgrass I see and not spend the $$ on Acclaim. That would have been frustrating to find out a couple weeks after spraying smartweed with acclaim that it wasn't going to work.

In the meantime, looks like I can break out triclopyr and test out on some on the smart weed.

[fun4me2]

Oh Geez..............
I thought, what you are calling "smartweed",
was a perennial in my garden.
I mean it fills in nicely....
of course it pretty much overtakes anything else, so I thin it out.
sheesh!!!

[flyingfish88]

I just realized I hit this one with tenacity last weekend when I was attacking nimble will.

Less than a week and starting to turn white. Looked up the label and turns out Tenacity is labeled for it.

[ken-n-nancy]

OK, I looked at my Nancy's mom's house in CT on Wednesday and found that this smartweed stuff is all over - in the flowerbeds, scattered in the lawn, in all the cracks in the driveway and between pavers, growing in the piles of sand in the gutter at the curb of the road.

I'm quite sure I've never seen it in my neighborhood, but that seems to be a good thing.

I thought, what you are calling "smartweed",
was a perennial in my garden.
I mean it fills in nicely....
of course it pretty much overtakes anything else, so I thin it out.
sheesh!!!

By the way, the definition of a "weed" is simply a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation, "a plant in the wrong place." A plant that is a weed in one context is not a weed when growing in a situation where it is in fact wanted, and where one species of plant is a valuable crop plant, another species might be a serious weed.

Ironically, this leads to some weird behaviors -- I am regularly pulling Kentucky Bluegrass "weeds" out of my flower beds so that the tiger lilies can do better, and just two feet away am removing tiger lily "weeds" that escaped out of the flower beds into the lawn.

If you like having "smartweed" as a perennial in your flower garden, that's great! It apparently reproduces aggressively, so it's great to have in a low-maintenance garden bed, as long as you're prepared to do the work to handle where it tries to escape into the lawn.

At Nancy's mom's house, there's a landscaping bed with a lot of "smartweed" in it that looks really nice. In that location, it's not a weed, but a desirable plant, because it's what is being encouraged to grow there.

[andy10917]

While there are reputable sites claiming that Triclopyr gives "excellent" control of Smartweed, my son is reporting that after initial damage to Smartweed using Triclopyr, it's recovering without killing it.

"Tenacity" is labelled for Smartweed control. If you've used Tenacity and achieved control of it, please post and share your results with other members.

[flyingfish88]

Full disclaimer - I invalidated my own tenacity test. Prior to my recent vacation I went around and hand pulled as many smartweed plants as possible as the potential high number of seeds they can produce had me concerned. This included the ones that I hit with tenacity.

However, I can say that the few I hit with tenacity looked extremely beat up and well on their way to dying.

[bryankloos]

I treated a smaller section of lawn with smarteeed last week with spectracide which seemed to have a decent effect.

I broadcast the lawn with tenacity this evening to cover the entire lawn.

Will report back with results in a few days.