Best way to control this clover

last year

last modified: last year

We converted from mulch to Stone a few years back. I made the mistake of using Lowe's 30-year best weed fabric which after 2 years clover is coming through. Yeah they refunded my money but so what...take forever to rerake all the stone and redo all the weed fabric.A lot of what's coming up this is clover any idea what it is the best way to kill it without harming some foliage around it.

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Comments (5)

Andre Laplume
Original Author
last year
gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9)
last year
That's oxalis, not clover. And you can't blame the landscape fabric......the oxalis is growing in the surface debris that has accumulated on the top of the fabric, not growing from underneath.

Any kind of weed killer would also damage any desired plants it encounters. It might be easiest to scrape the stone away from it and pull manually.

Unfortunately, this is one of the major drawbacks of using a rock or stone mulch - harder for weed control/removal and it does nothing to improve the soil as an organic mulch would.
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floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK
last year
last modified: last year
Agreed. Nothing for it but constant hand weeding. A lesson in the drawbacks of landscape fabric. I'm amazed you got a refund as the fabric is not deficient. It's just behaving normally.
Andre Laplume
Original Author
last year
Weird we never had it before.,some. Areas the fabric are degraded and I see it in dirt. Also have in areas of my lawn this year. Those I sray with regular weed killer.
BillMN-z4a
last year
We've had a river rock bed 30' long on the north side of the house since we moved here 13 years ago.

About 5 years ago, I moved all the rock to the driveway, pressure washed it clean, tore out the old landscape fabric and corrected the slant of the grade so it went away from the house instead of towards it.

Installed new landscape fabric (almost necessary when using stones) replaced the washed rocks and every Fall use my leaf blower on high to remove as many of the leaves as I can to keep them from composting in to mulch.

You'll never get all of them so after a couple years, there will be small amounts of compost sitting top of the fabric.

So many seeds are 'Wind distributed' and many 'bird distributed'.

Those seeds that get distributed into you rock mulch and stay moist for a few days, during a rainy period or heavy dew will geminate and begin to grow. Even if the roots do not penetrate the fabric.

I've even had oxalis, crawl over my plastic lawn edging and spread into the bed that way.

And I'm always pulling small tree and shrub seedlings as I see them, dozens every year, from this bed.

My ninebark is starting to become a major contributor but Amur maple, Siberian elm and a host of others make a showing annually but most of those are fairly easy to pull and you get the whole root system.