Weed Control

Weed control on the Eastern Shore is not generic lawn maintenance.

The sandy soils, salt air, tidal influence, and the specific invasive pressure that moves up this peninsula require someone who understands what the land is actually asking for. We’ve been managing weeds and invasive plants across Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia for 30 years. We carry MDA Pesticide Business License #27327 and Applicator #42337. We know what works here and why.

Dodder lives off the plants it lands on.

Dodder (Cuscuta) turns up as a tangle of orange or yellow thread draped over a shrub or a bed, and from a distance it reads as fishing line caught in the branches. There are no leaves on it and almost no green. A seed germinates in the soil in late spring and sends up a thin thread with about a week of stored food in it to find something to live on. If it finds nothing it dies. If it touches a plant it can use, it coils around a stem, drives into the plant’s plumbing, and its own connection to the ground shrivels off. From then on it drinks from the host.

It takes broadleaf plants and mostly leaves grasses alone, so a lawn is rarely the casualty. What it takes is the perennial bed, the hedge line, clover and alfalfa in a hay field, and the shrubs along the water’s edge.

Spraying is not the first answer. Once dodder has connected to a host the two share plumbing, so a systemic herbicide put on the vine goes into the plant underneath it. In an ornamental bed that means killing the hosta to kill the thing sitting on the hosta. There are settings where the right chemistry fits and we use it, but in a landscape bed the move that works is to cut the infested material out, take the vine with it, and haul it off the property. Not to the compost pile and not to a brush heap at the back of the field, because a strand of dodder still attached to a piece of host keeps living. Cut below the lowest point where it has attached. Anything left connected grows back.

The seed is why this is a multi-year job. One dodder plant sets thousands of seeds and they stay viable in the soil for years, ten or more is not unusual. Ground that seeded last August keeps sending up threads every spring for a long time after the original vine is gone. So the work is: cut it out this year before it flowers, put a pre-emergent on that same ground in early spring, and keep looking at the spot every year until nothing comes up.

It travels in what gets moved. Dodder seed moves in soil, in hay, in mulch, and on mowers and tillage equipment. If one corner of a property has it, that corner is the last place to load from and the first place to wash equipment down after.

When each of these gets treated.

The difference between weed control that holds and weed control that gets redone is usually when it was done. Each of these plants has a point in the year where it is vulnerable, and that is not always the point where it looks worst.

Early spring. Pre-emergent goes down before the soil warms and the annual seed germinates. That is the one easy way to deal with dodder and crabgrass both, since neither is easy once it is up and running. This is also when we walk last fall’s phragmites and knotweed treatments and count what came back.

Late spring into early summer. Dodder seedlings show as fine orange threads before they have thickened into mats. Pulled at that stage they come out with the host barely marked.

Midsummer. Dodder flowers, small white clusters all through the mat, and once those set seed the ground below is stocked for the next decade. Cutting infested plants out in July, before the flowers turn, is the most useful thing done about dodder in a season. Same window for cut-and-treat work on knotweed, and for mowing heavy phragmites thatch so there is fresh leaf to treat in the fall.

Late summer to first frost. The systemic window. Perennials with deep roots and rhizome systems, phragmites, knotweed and multiflora rose among them, are pulling food down into storage, and foliar herbicide goes down with it. Treating phragmites in this stretch also gets ahead of the seed heads.

Winter. Dead canes and cut brush come down, field edges get cut back to where they belong, and the ground is open enough to see what next year’s program has to cover. Full detail on the reed itself is on the phragmites control page.