I don't have the answer, but I'm VERY eager to hear some suggestions as well. Are you talking about the trailing type? I don't know the difference between the minor and major. The one that I've been pulling up for 6 years is the trailing kind. It spreads underground, and will sneak up through the drainage holes of large planters. I've never been successful in eradicating it. It will choke any plant to death, if I let it. Are we battling the same plant, vettin? I really hope someone has a great solution. This stuff drives me nuts! Lisa

The difference between the minor and the major is only the size of the leaves and blossoms. Both of them trail, or just spread out horizontally along the ground, ROOTING AS THEY GO! This is a plant which still exists all over California in areas where homes were 100 - 150 years ago, which are long gone. The vinca persists.

Re not letting it be a haven for other things - we mow ours (which we actually like - it is in a bed contained on 4 sides by the sidewalk, the driveway, a cement wall, and physical bed edging). Mowing might give you an opportunity to get in there and eradicate the poison ivy by painting it with Brush-Be-Gone or something like that. I have no idea how to kill vinca, but it certainly has the reputation of being impossible to kill.

Jackie

I'm afraid I'm not successful at all. I leave it in wilder areas but try to fight it in beds. I'm hoping vinca, honeysuckle, and creeping jenny will fight it out and leave only one for me to eradicate in my small wooded area. Actually I feel quite hopeless.

Like Roseseek said. Also spray Roundup with a sticker (commercial or dish detergent). It will almost certainly require repeated application. Finally you can dig it out and a foot deep sounds about right. It is hard work but faster.

If the weed has a waxy cuticle, like Algerian Ivy and Vinca, spreader stickers aren't much help. You need to "wound" the plant (scrape the leaves, cut off the leaves and allow the severed leaf stalks to remain, cut off the branch tips, etc.) to create entry points for the herbicides before submerging them in the solutions. It's also the method recommended for brushy weeds such as poison oak/ivy/sumac.

Kim, here repeated applications of Roundup with sticker does work. (Maybe my walking around on it produced sufficient bruising). I have also seen on the label that different concentrations are recommended for different purposes. Perhaps it is different in California .

Cath

I'm going to try the "coffee can method". Too bad I just pulled some patches of it to the ground level. They will be back! Thanks, Kim. Lisa

I'm glad it worked, Cath. Usually for waxier, slicker types (think Algerian Ivy types), the herbicide just beads up on the skin and dries. That's what the Bonide Citric Acid and the vinegar did with the Washingtonia seedlings (thick as grass they were, all through the gravel and too established to pull, with soil too hard to dig). Cutting off the tops and hitting them with Round Up cleared them out. And, soaking the wounded ends of the ivy killed it. I'll bet your bruising it also helped. That likely produced the wounds to allow it entry. Thanks, I'm aware of the various concentrations recommended for different purposes. I've made use of them.

Would mowing it work to "wound" it and spray right after?

I doubt it would be AS effective as the "wick" method (coffee can with much wounded stem absorbing, "wicking" the material over a longer period). Vinca stems aren't that thick and you would need to saturate each cut end with the herbicide for it to soak in and kill the whole plant. Spraying is going to spread more material over a larger area, potentially exposing more plants (and other living organisms) to the chemical. Systemic products are generally much more effective with greater amounts of tissue to soak in to. You wouldn't cut your roses back and remove their foliage before spraying with anything systemic. You'd want as much leaf surface as possible to soak up the active ingredients to get as much of them IN TO the plant as possible. You can give it a try. I hope it works for you. Vinca is "herpes with chlorophyll"!

Yes Kim, the coffee can method (in our case wine bottle) is for the very toughest plants. I use it for tree seedlings that have gotten away from me and I can no longer pull or dig without "excavating".

Cath

My bermuda grass doesn't let my vinca spread too much...

Ha, ha, Nik! :-)

Great suggestions from Kim and Cath! I removed a huge patch at a client's by shearing with hedge clippers, beating and stabbing it repeatedly and with much satisfaction (bruising it), saturating it with Roundup and smothering it in black plastic during high summer. Be sure to give it a good beating and stabbing.

I'm usually such a pacifist. }:-] Carol

Try mowing it and then spreading roundup. Mowing would certainly give you lots of open wounds for the roundup to enter. Do the roundup immediately following the mowing. If you wait a few hours the plant may be able to seal off the wounds.

Also, use the plain roundup not the enhanced quick-kill kind. The quick-kill stuff has a second weedkiller in it that sometimes kills off the top of the plant before the roundup part has a chance to get down deep and kill the roots. That kind is actually LESS effective.

"

Remove Periwinkle Ground Cover Manually

Alright, it sounds like a pain in the-you-know-what, but manual removal really works best. Dig deep into the soil, starting at the edge of the problem area. Remember that periwinkle weed control relies upon complete removal of those roots, which may be several feet into the soil.

Make a two-foot trench around the area and loosen the first section of roots. Pull as you dig further into the bed, loosening the soil as you go. The next season, if you see any small plants forming, immediately dig them out. In this way you will be rid of the ground cover permanently in a couple of years and other plants can take over the area. It won’t be easy, but it is a non-toxic removal that is effective."

The above is from:

https://gardening.stackexchange.com/questions/32535/what-is-this-variegated-low-growing-plant-with-purple-flowers-and-how-do-i-get

I like Henry's suggestion best. I'd rather live with weeds than use Roundup, I think.We all know that glysophates are DANGEROUS and we should just stop using them,IMO. No exceptions.

Of course, you and Henry are absolutely right, Bart! Digging is the environmentally sane method. It's the one I'll be implementing in my own garden this fall when I attempt to eradicate wire vine from an ever increasing section of real estate...using a sharp spade! Carol

I have a RU question. I will be starting a new rose garden on a country property, a land of weeds and tall grass, Can I just use RU to kill the weeds and grass, and wait for a week to transfer a few roses there? Or should I wait for 2 weeks before planting? I will be there on the weekends only, so I have to start a garden with a super speed.

SUPPOSEDLY, once the weeds are dead, you can plant. I've not done what you are asking. I have used the wick method to take care of bind weed in an existing garden (after trying repeatedly to dig it out) and to kill resistant crepe myrtle suckers in an existing garden after a large plant was "removed" without any issues to the existing plantings.

Thanks Kim! :-)

You're welcome!

I wonder if translocation experience in relatively warm zone 9 will apply to someone living in relatively cool zone 6? Also, I wonder if the soil type and pH could play a role.

"Degradation of glyphosate in northern ecosystems It is widely believed that glyphosate degrades in 2 weeks, and has low accumulation and drift in nature [4,16]. However, this conventional view may be premature, or only applicable to certain environments, because most literature on the biological impacts of glyphosate is based either on laboratory bioassays or short-term field studies, conducted primarily in agro-environments and limited climatic conditions, mainly in Central Europe and the USA. For example, studies on herbicide residues in boreal environments have demonstrated that glyphosate and the main metabolite of glyphosate degradation, 2-amino-3-(5-methyl- 3-oxo-1,2-oxazol-4-yl)propanoic acid (AMPA), can be traced from soils even years after the last spraying 15,17,18]."

http://www.charcoalfinland.fi/Helander%20et%20al.%20Trends%20in%20Plant%20Science%202012.pdf

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http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jafc.7b02474

http://www.redalyc.org/pdf/573/57347465001.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045653516304039

I use RoundUp.

I would not use it near edible plant areas, and IMO the main reason is to avoid GMO's is that many of them (not all) are drenched in RoundUp. It is indeed not as benign as was believed for many years.

However, I live in a wildfire-prone area of not quite 3 acres. Here the vegetation must be controlled not only for safety reasons but also as a matter of law. Much of the area is too steep for mowing. I hand pull a lot of weeds, but rely on RoundUp as one of my tools. I do everything I can to minimize the amount I use, but I need to use some. In fact, this year I cut back too much and had a pretty bad problem by late summer. I've been paying for it as I hand cut a thicket of 5 foot thistles on barely walkable ground for the past month.

Rosefolly

The vinca is still winning. For the wick method, how long does it take? A week for each can? A month?

also, where I did remove it, is now covered in weeds. What it the best way to do this so that I can leave it until Sept when ready to put grass seed down? Remove weeds and cover with black plastic bags?

thank you!!

I have vinca filled in one rose garden. I will try to brush ru on it, hope it works.

Unfortunately my neighbors have it on their side of the fence well it doesn't stay on their side of the fence it winds its way over into my yard and all I can do is just keep trimming that nasty stuff. What a pain vinca is. there are some things I will never plant oh yeah did I mention wisteria coming up in the middle of my lawn

Lol

Roundup might work with less effort but digging vinca up is possible. It used to strangle half my front garden and had made its way through the lawn when I decided to tackle it last year. When possible, rake as much of it up first - it gets very tangled and tearing the leaves out helps with identifying and digging up roots. Then get ready for a lot of digging and sifting for roots! I still have a problem with it running through a large lilac which I just have to live with, but it's manageable now.

Yes! I have also dug it out of beds I needed for something else such as roses! and it never came back. One needs to cover with cardboard and mulch right away to keep out other weeds. However, I am in the minority that as a contained groundcover I much prefer it to ivy or euonymous. Those have the added feature of climbing up trees and houses.

Even Round-up Inc. does not recommend it's product for vinca.

Still no cure, but we have had vinca minor (on purpose) in 2 large beds (60 x 12ft and 50 x 12ft) out between the sidewalk, a cast concrete wall, a concrete path, and 2 driveways for over 30 years. Obviously, the key is to make sure any bed it is in is surrounded by concrete or a road. We planted it along with a yellow daisy ground cover from South Africa - can't remember its name. In 30 years, neither of them has escaped into another part of the garden, and I must say that the daisies try harder than the vinca - we have to trim them off of the sidewalk once a year with an edger.

Both of the beds had been used for decades to park cars, so they were full of old gravel and saturated with weed killer, and the soil, which was decent, was compacted and hard. I thought that these would be good places to try vinca and the daisies, since they both had a reputation of being unkillable thugs. We planted them without any amendments or digging to the soil, after just trying to rake up most of the gravel, to see if it would work. Ha! They loved it, and in 12 months had covered both beds, digging through the soil themselves. The two ground covers compete with each other, (the daisies like more sun, the vinca less, so the daisies predominate in the Spring, Summer, and Fall, and bloom then, and the vinca in the winter and early Spring, when they bloom). Between the two of them, they blot out almost all of the grass weeds. We DO have about a half dozen roses growing in these beds, but each of them is in an individual raised bed made of concrete tree surrounds, which make keeping both ground cover plants away from the roses easy. Tall and medium tall Iris also don't have any problem coming up through these ground covers, so I have planted lots of them in these beds too, as well as some tall South African bulbs such as ixia. Of course, the other unkillable naturalized plant around here, valerian (Jupiter's beard) has volunteered to also grow in these beds, and we just cut it down to the ground after it blooms in the Spring.

Not a solution after the vinca gets somewhere you don't want it, but just wanted to say that it CAN be planted somewhere if you have an area where the hardscape already exists to contain it. We love it, and actually between the two "thugs" the South African daisies are much more in evidence most of the time, although that is probably because of our Mediterranean climate.

Jackie

I'm with Jackie, and those who think vinca is ok; I'd much, much MUCH rather cope with it than bindweed, and all the other thuggy weeds that, unlike vinca, are ugly.

Round Up (glysphate) is POISON. I think it has been banned here in Europe, as it should be world-wide. Studies have shown that it has managed to get into food products, even the milk of nursing mothers. And people wonder why cancer is attacking people at ever-younger ages...