Curled Dock
Curled Dock, Rumex Crispus L., is the bane of my backyard, and is the single most difficult plant to eradicate that I’ve encountered to date.
It’s a broad leafed perennial, non-native in the US, that grows a giant taproot that can extend up to a foot underground and more than three inches in width (!)… and yes, those figures are from personal experience. I’m not sure how it got here to Texas, but it sure as heck has made my life impossible.
First, here’s what a specimen looks like above ground.
Rumex Crispus in it's natural habitat -- My Backyard.
When you try to dig it up (I’ve found that it’s easiest with a pickaxe, frankly…), you’ll encounter the SERIOUS taproot.
The root... or what's left after I sliced it with a flat bladed pickaxe.
There's even some still in the ground.
The whole plant looks like this, above and below ground including the root. Note that this is a juvenile plant, although it probably was alive last year and just got mowed over.
Entire plant, including root. The root is about 2 inches in diameter.
The worst part is that if you mow this plant, it will just send shoot after shoot up. You need to chop the root off a few inches below ground so that the leaves run out of steam before they hit the surface. Young plants are hard to do this with… It’s almost worth taking the time to make it easy to chop the big root.
Leaf structure. Note the curled edges, which help discriminate it from Broad-leaved Dock.
The weed controllers that I’ve tried have been mostly ineffective against it. Roundup did not kill a mature plant but will kill a very young plant, at the expense of the surrounding grass… mature St. Augustine will mostly choke out new plants, but will be destroyed from beneath by mature ones. Chopping the root off too shallowly also didn’t kill it. Spading or levering it up with the flat blade of a pickaxe has been the most successful of the control methods I’ve tried to date on mature plants.
[...] I usually keep a bit of a mulch berm around my tomato plants to help hold moisture in the soil near them but to keep the leaves from dripping down into the moist mulch. And by the way, I thoroughly wish I was using home-made mulch here, but my yard’s a bit short right now on mulching materials unless I want to mulch with dead thistle or curled dock… [...]
[...] the hard clay soil here, how well it fits my hand, and how useful it is for everything from pulling giant curled dock roots to cutting St. Augustine runners. Constant [...]