If you don't mind using chemicals, monkey grass can take a light dose (deluted) of round-up. Also I've used a product called Vantage found at a farm supply.

Are these Tall Growing weeds? If tall weeds, here is a suggestion. Buy a pair of those yellow PLAYTEX-type, long sleeved rubber dish washing gloves. Buy a couple of pairs of those $1 cotton garden gloves. Put on the yellow gloves. turn down the sleeves so it will catch anything which might run onto your arm. Put on the cotton gloves. Now pour Round-Up on the cotton gloves so they are wet with the weed killer but don't drip. Grab each weed in the glove and pull your hand upwards to coat the weed. Do not pull the weed, just let your hand slide over it and coat it with Round-up. Wait until the days are above 80 degrees, per Round-up instructions. You can also carefully paint the weed leaves with Round-up using a 50 cent foam rubber brush.

Very good advice. I have to admit, the cotton glove strategy is an award winner. Thanks!

Be sure to use the rubber gloves. The active ingrediant in Round-up is glyphosphate. It is not supposed to be deadly but then neither was Agent Orange (dioxin) back in the 1970s. I'm sure I ingested enough dioxin when I was in Vietnam to make mush out of my liver and several other internal organs. I've had two friends die from Agent Orange (dioxin) related liver cancer. I am very careful when handling chemicals.

For a woody weed (I get hackberry seedlings that are impossible to pull up) you can cut the top off leaving a stump just tall enough to find in the monkey grass. Put a drop of undiluted Roundup on the stump and it won't come back. I keep some Roundup stored in a CLEARLY LABELED drop-top bottle that I can grab up when I go out to weed.

If you have a larger, woody seedling, you can cut it off, drill a hole in the top of the trunk and fill the hole with RoundUp. You can also drill roots on top of the ground and fill them.

I use a product called "Image" from Ambrands. Lowes sells it. It specifically states on the label directions that it can be used on liriope and mondograss. Works pretty good; just don't overdo it.

If possible, I prefer pulling weeds to poisoning them, but sometimes poison is the only option.

One thing you can do with thick monkey grass is give it a shave with the lawnmower on its highest setting. The weed gets cut back, the monkey grass grows back quicker than the weeds, and it always worked for me. I sprigged in monkey grass under two pear trees and trimmed it once a year in late spring. If I had those big briars which grow like Jack's Bean Stalk, you do have to dig those things out by the root. Always do your weeding after a heavy rain when the soil is soft, naturally.

Those big briars are probably smilax glauca. You either have to dig the roots or here is a tip to get rid of them. Put Roundup and water in in a glass coke bottle. Put the end of the vine in the coke bottle. Tie a string around the vine and then around the neck of the bottle to keep the vine in the bottle. Let the bottle pull the vine over and stand it up on the ground. The vine will pull the Roundup into its "veins" and kill it to the roots.

I've used that method to kill vines. It lets the vine "drink" itself to death. Very satisfying. :)

ooooh! What a cool idea on the vines!!! I'm looking forward to trying this.!

As for the weeds in the monkey grass....I also prefer to pulling when necessary. But sometimes, a chemical is necessary. I've used Image...it is not only safe to use on monkey (liriope) grass but on Mondo grass as well. And it is one of the very few herbicides that is safe to use on centipede and St.Augustine grasses. It is also great for wild onion and one of the ONLY products I know of that will kill nutsedge.

Bluesage, I wish I had known about Image when my back yard at MoccasinLanding was solid with wild onions after my six months job in south Texas! I pulled out by root two wheelbarrows full of onions--the kind which make bulblets above and below ground. It was a twoday job. I did not poison them because the yard was on the bank of a bayou and I worried about runoff.

Tsmith, yes, I had smilax in the yard too, and trimming it back w/ lawnmower was difficult for me, because it put out some kind of chemical which took my breath away. Maybe it is different from the briar of which I speak, which jumps from the ground 1/2" thick and goes straight up even 10-15' to reach a tree limb before it gets dependent on its host, and it has tremendous thorns on it. It also makes a big root ball which looks exotic if cleaned up and dried.

The cotton glove and foam brush technique came in handy when my son applied poison to the poison ivy down by the bayou one year. I got into that stuff when I had busted blisters on my hands, not knowing what it looked like, never having an allergy to it before, and my hands ended up looking like boiled weiners. Since it got into my blood stream, I am now allergic to all sorts of chemicals and must be very careful.

the weeds in my thick monkey grass looks almost like monkey grass, except it seems to grow in a vine like way. I can push the monkey grass aside to pull the weeds, but it breaks off or comes loose with long skinny vines. I also have an outside cat who usually lays in the monkey grass..so concerned about that.

A photo would help identify the weedy vine.

With a cat using the monkey grass for a bed, you certainly wouldn't want to use a poison to kill the weeds - you might defoliate the cat! LOL!

Terry's (tsmith) terrible precognition became a devastating reality last December. Of all of his hundreds of posts to be resurrected at this time, surely this one is the most painfully ironic.

Yet, I can't help but feel that he's speaking to all of us, sharing his experiences yet one more time. Be careful, very careful, when using chemical pesticides of any kind. We just don't know the long term effects that some of these chemicals might have on us, our family members, our pets, or our Earth.

Rest In Peace, Terry. I hope that this thread can go silent.

To buttercupmammie, that sounds like the same problem that I have in my monkey grass. It is crabgrass and has long runners on it. It is really taking over. To Sundog and Bluesage, I am going to try Image. I have waaaaay too much crabgrass to use the coke bottle method, although that is a great idea. I will try that method for my cat briars. Thanks to all.

"OverTheTop" works on grass, like bermuda, but not all weeds. Ornamec is the same thing.

I use Over the Top to kill bermuda and it works but it's not a forever solution. I have to do it every year, sigh. I tried Image and it nearly killed my mondo grass, perhaps I mixed incorrectly but I will not try it again.

I used Sedgehammer to kill sedge growing in mondo grass. Expensive, effective but again, not a permanent solution. Has to be done yearly or more. I know golf courses use it to maintain those perfectly manicured lawns.

Atrazine and Simazine in diluted solution works wonders on wild onion, buttonweed and nutgrass, etc for heartier ground covers such as Mondo Liriope - Monkey grasses and Ivy, Creeping Fig, etc. Those 2 are milky white herbicides and can be used as a per-emergent on Bermuda and Zoysia lawns once they go into the dormant stage. I would suggest treating ground cover entirely with pre-emergent and then with a non-selective herbicide, meticulously go thru and spray each weed not worrying if it kills that quarter sized spot in the ground cover because it will grow back in no time. But this should help eradicate your weed infestation. If it is too congested with weeds and/or wild grass growth then I suggest replanting it. And like anything else in this world, maintenance is key to full coverage without weeds.

Can I spray Trimec on monkey grass and blue lirope?

Need a new post, these folks moved on years ago