Sand burrs!!!!!!!!

OUSoonerPIP – posted 11 June 2002 18:12

I live in Oklahoma and I bought my house from an elderly lady. Apparently she didn`t mow the grass very often and I have about 2 1/2 acr. of sand burrs. I have been mowing the yard once a week to try and kill the sand burrs out, but they seem to be growing along the ground and still producing stickers. I have tried to drig them out, but their are so many it is almost impossible. Can anyone recommend a sticker kill that I can spray on them to kill them? Please instead of replying on the message board, please email me at OU*********@cs.com

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you very much and I enjoy this site alot.

Tony Pippin

WillR – posted 12 June 2002 06:29

Replying via the e-mail only does nothing to educate all the readers of the message board (which is what it is for).

I encountered the same problem on a much smaller scale while trying to help my grandmother’s yard. Seems the problem with little old ladies is that they insist on mowing their yards very close (which kills the grass and allows for weeds).

What I did was to buy Round-Up concentrate, and applied it on a large scale. Of course this killed everything which was fine with me since there was no viable grass to salvage anyway.

The fellow down the street from me got rid of his sand spurs, stickers, and weeds by using a product that he called “Clean Up”.

I am sure that Phill probably has some better insight on this. Hopefully he will respond.

Good luck!

::: edited to remove the obvious typos :::

[This message has been edited by WillR (edited 12 June 2002).]

tdkx – posted 12 July 2002 15:20

WillR gives great advice on this subject as to immediate eradication. This advice will work well for you as long as you try to create a lawn. Any product with glyphosate in it will do the trick.(check the label of course) Otherwise, the stickers that you have(seeds)will establish themselves again as soon as they can. Just a thought to consider. I pull them out by hand when I see them growing in my turf(before they make stickers) and throw them into a sterile environment like a driveway where they cannot root themselves. After the tractors and cars drive over them, and sun beats down on them, they are a non-factor.

tdkx

drmau – posted 25 August 2003 11:33

My wife and I have an acreage in Iowa and the 2 acres surrounding our home is sandy and the grass seems to get thinner each year. I too have pets that are burdened with sand burr stickers. So much that they sometimes refuse to venture off the concrete to the lawn or dog run to do their business. I heard about a guy in Texas that controls the stickers by way of a home made “carpet drag” that he pulls behind his riding mower. This sounds like a great idea to reduce the stickers and I do plan to try it soon. After all, they stick to your shoes and socks and when tracked into the house they seem to get lodged into the carpet real well making for pesky removal.

Svegan – posted 25 September 2006 21:36

http://www.enviromateinc.com/sandburr.asp

has useful information, about organic methods for sand burr removal.

wrangler – posted 26 September 2006 05:41

ousoonerpip,

Man can I relate to your situation with grassy sandburrs. I also live in Oklahoma and fight this nasty beast every year. Here are a few tips that I can pass along.

1) Fertilize and water to encourage aggressive growth of bermudagrass2) Apply a pre-emerge herbicide called Pendulum in the March before any sandburrs emerge. This will help with crabgrass control also. It only comes in 2 1/2 gal containers so you will most likly buying a 3 year supply. Store it in a place that will not get below 40 degrees F because it will crystalize if it gets too cold.3) Spray the weeds that escape with MSMA during the summer. Be careful not to overapply MSMA and do not allow grazing of animals since MSMA in arsenic based chemistry.4)Mow low and often5)Bag the clippings to remove the burrs

This time of year seems to be the hardest time to deal with sandburrs since the surviors are getting mature and setting lots of seed.

Since I do not specifically know your soil I would suggest that you pull a representative soil test 6″ deep and check the pH of the soil. Take it to you county extension agent. OSU has an excellent soit test lab. Many sandy soils in OK are prone to be low acidic so applying lime could help also.

Good luck

finesse – posted 28 August 2011 16:56

If you have a really bad infestation of sandburs the best thing is to pull the plants by the root being careful to get as many of the burs as possible and burn them. If the plants are mature with dry seeds you will typically drop some of the seeds and I try and get as many of these as possible by using a heavy leather glove to hand rake the thatch and retrieve them into a large bucket or other container. I often trim the stems with lots of dried seeds using scissors to cut them carefully into the bucket to avoid them falling off on the ground.

Then I mark the spot either by defoliating it or by using a stake and spray an area around the plant at least 3 feet radically around where the plant was located. I spray that area several times to keep the vegetation killed off so I can see the plants when they first surface so I can pull them before they produce burs. Also check the bottoms of your shoes/boots and do not track burs into new areas.

The worst plants are the ones that come up from roots from the prior years. Here in Texas it just does not get cold enough to kill off the roots even if the plant appears dead. Many such plants will sprout months earlier than new plants coming up from seeds and will produce prodigious amounts of sand burs. So never let the plants go at the end of the season just because they are drying up. Pull them up and clean up the area or at least spray them with a round up type spray before the surface plant is dead to make certain the roots are dead.

The next worst plants are the ones that come up in areas where there were a lot of seeds allowed to fall on the ground the previous year. If you understand statistics and the bell curve, you will understand that the more seeds the greater the chance they will produce plants and the sooner they will produce a plant, and the more of a problem that plant will be to you.

Also if you don’t clean up the sandburs and just let the old plants die and the burs fall off, the sand burs will still be lying on the ground and still have stickers on them into the summer months of the next year. When you go in you will spread them with your shoes or tires or pets or animals or even the wind. However if you aggressively pull the plants and pick up all the seeds or never allow the plants to produce seeds, there are no burs on the surface by the following June or July, as the burs deteriorate after 5 to 7 months on the ground depending on weather and soil type. The seeds in the burs (usually 4 to 5 **** seeds in each sand burr) do not have stickers and can remain viable for many years, typically up to 5 years, but the seeds are not problematic other than they will produce plants. It is the burs with stickers on them that are problematic and once you prevent the production of the sandburs, all you have to do is spray the areas regularly with a round up type spray killing the plants that come up before they can produce burs. This will kill the grass as well, but it is about the only way to really get rid of the sandburs once and for all and it will take 3 to 5 years of steady treatment to kill them off.

What you cannot do is just mow the areas or drive a riding lawn mower, tractor, or vehicle with rubber tires in the areas until you have eliminated the sandburs. Here we can get new plants as late as October and in warm years even into early November. Also if you just spray the areas while there are burs lying around you are probably spreading them to new areas while thinking your are killing them off.

I have been fighting them for about 8 years over dozens of acres and only in the areas I treated as spelled out above have I eliminated the sandburs and the sandbur plants entirely and it took 4 to 5 years in most of the heavily infested areas. I use a power sprayer towed by my riding lawn mower to do most of the spraying as some areas I just blanket spray and other areas I spot spray always erring on the side of spraying too large an area rather than too small an area. However, before I begin the spraying, I hand dug them up by the thousands of plants and it was very, very labor intensive.

Now I know what the plants look like from the time they are a **** plant to full grown and any where I go I am always looking down for them. Any time I spot a plant I pull it up roots and all and if it has seeds it goes into the burn pile and I mark the spot for future spraying. If it is too young to have seeds I just discard it after shaking the soil off the roots, and mark the spot for future spraying.

If you don’t have a severe infection like I had, you can probably do this in a less time consuming manner, but if they are everywhere, and you have allowed hundreds of large plants to drop tens of thousands of burs, this is the only way I know to get rid of them.

They are the most horrible plant I have ever encountered.