Follow Up on Using Preen This Summer to Control Weeds

This spring I posted about using Preen to control weeds instead of mulching.  You can read that article here:  Mulch In the Flower Bed – What Type to Use?  I haven’t liked any of the mulch materials we used in past gardens – newspapers (yuck!), grass (weedy and smelly), bark (can’t cultivate and it doesn’t last), straw (weeds), shredded wood chips (expensive and can’t cultivate) – so decided to use Preen around my perennials in back.

I put Preen down around the plants and in between. The directions say to not leave the dry material on the plants, so I brushed it off the leaves.

Daylilies with Preen for Weed Control

Here is a peony with Preen before I watered.

Peony Fertilized and with Preen

When I decided to fertilize the perennials one last time with special bloom-a-lot stuff, I found a couple problems. The green you see in this photo is a low growing weed with small leaves and thin, tendril roots.

This Means War! My Mom’s Peony Destroyed

This isn’t a hard weed to pull out, but it starts as tiny leaves that are easy to miss. According to the Michigan State University Weed ID Tool, this is Prostrate Spurge, an annual. (If you want to dazzle your friends with Latin names it is Euphorbia maculata) The site mentions that Prostrate Spurge loves to grow in full sun in parking lot crevices. That’s true and I can prove it by my driveway.

Here is a link to a better photo, copyright Ronald Calhoun.

Prostrate Spurge (A) — Euphorbia maculata — Family: Euphorbiaceae — Spurge © Copyright 2004-2013, Ronald Calhoun

It’s ugly. It has one redeeming quality and that is that the plants grow thickly together and make a mat that covers the dirt. That keeps other weeds from sprouting, so once you pull this out you have clean soil.

I checked the rest of my garden and found only a couple small spots with weeds in the main perennial beds but a ton of nasty crab grass and its relatives in the border section that runs along the fence. I think the spurge stuff had already sprouted before Preen and it was so small that evaded death when I weeded this spring.

Preen is supposed to work on crabgrass. To be fair, the narrow garden strip by the fence borders several hundred acres of wild grassy plants. I’m going to pull the nasty things out this weekend and maybe try a heavier dose next spring.