What can I do to eradicate mares tail

Get 2 stones, mash the Marestail between them then add weedkiller. It has thick skin that stops weedkillers thus you need to mash them up to get it into the weed itself.

I have never had the problem and it sounds like Kildermorie has experienced the method described.

Just to add that the other day another GOY member wanted a product called Kurtail to kill mare's tail. She was told it worked.

A company called Progreen.co.uk sell it and if you use eBay one seller has it on there too.

My parents used to have mares tail in the garden, they just kept pulling it up whenever they spotted it. Eventually it gave up and stopped growing. Hate to think how long its going to take me to do the same thing in my new place - ridiculous amounts of mares tail.

I have found the same Samjp. I had quite a lot once. I pulled it up whenever I saw some and now I just get the odd one and very flimsy. It also grows up amongst plants so weedkiller is a not possible.

There are two sorts of growth - the normal one with leaves but also an earlier one without leaves and just a sort of little knob at the top. This is the fruiting head that will shed spores everywhere so its important to be especially vigilant with these. They are very deep rooted so digging them out on its own isn't effective, you have to just keep pulling what you can see until they are so weak they give up as the others have said. Can take years unfortunately. I hope the new weedkiller works - please let us know whether it does.

I bought some curtail off Ebay and it arrived yesterday. It is very expensive but is the only weed killer that seems to have any effect on marestail. Crushing the stems might help a bit if using another weed killer but i tried that without much success. Kurtail turns the shoots black in 4-5 days. There may be some new growth but it can be kept under control.

If you have it in amongst plants it is virtually impossible to eradicate( because you can't kill the marestail without killing the other plants) but I had excellent success on a couple of gravel drives using Kurtail last year.

Another poster on here swears that malt vinegar applied to a broken stem does the job.

Horsetail/Marestail has a silicate lining that stops weedkiller:you can actually use Marestail to clean pots it is that abrasive. Crushing it allows the weedkiller to get to the roots and be systemic. It is a plant that has been around since dinosaur times, so is one tough plant. Crushing the stems works well if you have plants nearby you want to keep, use a lawnmower over the area then spray weedkiller if it is in an area with no other plants.

Crushing it could be worth it although a lot of work. We no longer have a grass lawn lol. Thanks for the tip. Glad I spotted this question :-))