How to kill Bindweed.

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Bindweed comes from

• Soil that has lain undisturbed for up to fifty years can contain seeds that can be awakened and spring into life by digging and building work going on in your garden. 
• It also grows from roots, never ever put it in your compost heap, when you spread the compost you will almost certainly be spreading bits of bindweed. The tiniest piece of stem or root will eventually colonise your garden.
• In soil or pots brought into your garden, It is worth checking plants you have bought in containers to make sure the plant pot is not a "Trojan horse" for the weed.

Keeping a garden free of bindweed.

• Preventing this weed from getting into your garden is almost impossible, especially if it is growing in your neighbours garden, even gardens a few gardens away. It will creep under fences, garden walls almost nothing can stop it and its seeds are virtually impossible to keep out of your garden. Bind weed likes cultivated soil just like the soil in our gardens. 

• Watch for Bindweed appearing and growing in your garden, pulling it up doesn't work, the bits of root you leave will sprout and produce new growth. You could try digging deep enough to get to the bottom of the root system, making sure you remove even the tiniest bits of root.
• Continually cutting the weed of at ground level can work by eventually starving the plant of light and draining energy from the root. This could take forever though.
• Covering the Bindweed infected area with sheets of black plastic to starve the plant of light and drain energy from the root eventually kills it. However, once again this could take a long time and you will need to look out for and deal with shoots appearing from the edges of the plastic sheet.
• The best way to kill bindweed completely root and all is to treat the weed with Glyphosate as I have described below.

What's good about Bindweed?

Nothing, but grudgingly I suppose I quite like the delicate flowers which give of a soft fragrance and are Bee and other insects friendly. On the other hand, so are the plants and flowers it will eventually kill off and replace with a suffocating tangled mess of vine!  Kill it and control new growth.

The only sure way to control it is to kill the whole plant including the green and the roots, contact type weed-killers kill the leaves and stem, but leave the roots alive, to grow again.

A brilliant tip here sent to my guest book, thank you Francis

Just to add to the help page on controlling or eliminating Bindweed. I thought your subscribers might find this addition helpful.

Having done battle with Bindweed in my garden when I lived in Cardiff (where it rained regularly) over many years, and noting your aversion to glycophospate, I found that the way to overcome the plants was to unpick the creeper off the garden plants, minimising damage to the Bindweed, and to gather its stems and leaves -everything above ground - into polythene bags, so the bags would end up upside down and the plant would remain viable (for a few days). I would then apply/spray the gylcophospate into the polythene bag and then gently tie it off at its open end, and leave the weedkiller to do its work over several days. This allowed the toxins to be carried well into the root system over several days, minimised the amount of weedkiller needed, meant that it could be used right next to delicate garden plants - and was a solution that worked even when was raining regularly.

I thought Bindweed was bad. I moved house to Reading, and discovered Horsetail, and that dealing with Bindweed was like being on the Kindergarten slopes of weed control. I still have roofing felt sheets down after 3 years and stuff popping up wherever it likes (even through the felt sheeting in places).