Question from Jean Dennison: How do I get rid of horsetails, Equisetum, growing in my organic vegetable garden? There are chickens in the garden in the winter and it is rotivated for the vegetables in spring. I use it for scrubbing pans, and also as a hair rinse, but I have well in excess of what I need.
Eric: If I may so your hair is a picture!
Bob: This is one of the things that there is no cure for. I remember on this programme I talked to somebody who said that it goes down twenty feet, and Geoffrey Smith said "No - I met a miner and he found it on level 7!" This is the problem, it's very wide ranging, and if you've got it in your garden, it's probably covering half an acre or an acre. Even if you manage to get rid of it, it would still be coming back. The one advantage with it is it's actually not that competitive to your plants. It doesn't cast much shade, but it does rob nutrients and water. You should hoe it off as fast as it comes and just try and keep it from swamping things, because you'll never get rid of it. It will compost well, it's rich in silica, and it will turn into a good compost.
John: You realise this plant was here about 450 million years ago, and presumably we've been trying to get rid of it ever since, so you'll never get rid of it in a year or two! Now you've admitted to being organic, and I can't hold that against you. I would like to but I can't. But if you weren't organic, or if you happen to change back for a week or so in the spring, jump up and down on it as soon as it comes up, then give it a quick blast of glyphosate. It won't disappear, but it'll sicken it, give it another quick blast in September, and then go back to being organic! You would sicken it - you wouldn't get rid of it but you'd set it back.
Eric: It's all very well saying just abandon being organic for two days in the spring and two days in September, but you'd be abandoning it for the rest of the year as well if you just did that.
Nigel: Exactly. And even glyphosate needs many, many applications. But I think if you keep hoeing, and never let it come up, that's the secret, because eventually all green plants must have light, and if it doesn't have light the root system has nothing to sustain, so ultimately it will die out.
Bob: Nigel's right, if you could get the whole root network. And John's almost right with the glyphosate, but my own experience with horsetails proves otherwise. Although I'm totally organic in my own garden, I have been to agricultural college and I'm fully qualified to use every chemical available to professionals in this country, and I have used chemicals professionally at several factory sites I used to look after. I wasn't allowed to use my flame gun underneath the gas tank, so I was rather forced to use herbicides. I don't think there's anything wrong with using herbicides on an asphalt car park because if you don't, in a few years' time you're going to have to re-asphalt and that's far more damaging ecologically. Anyway, this damn horsetail was coming up through the foundations of the factory, coming out through the walls, under the gas tank, up through the tarmac. I sprayed it two, three, four times a year for two or three years and it had no effect. Eventually the factory owner said, "Let's just save the money and leave it alone", because it doesn't work, you can't get rid of it.
