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, Its 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, but 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.

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 weedkillers kill the leaves and stem, but leave the roots alive, to grow again.

• I find the best way to control Bindweed, I don't like using chemicals, but with bindweed I feel its justified, is to ask your gardener to treat the growing leaves with weed-killer containing Glyphosate this attacks the leaves and the roots and will kill the complete plant. Depending on the type of weedkiller used, you may need to repeat the treatment several times.  I use the undiluted Glyphosate and dilute it myself. It is a lot cheaper and better.
• Look out for the inevitably new growth, either from seed or from under the neighbours fence and treat it as soon as it appears.
• If your neighbour neglects the garden, It is almost impossible to stop it creeping back over, under and through neighbouring fences and walls, you could try asking  them to control it, but it is probably easier to check now and again and destroy it yourself.