Cthulhuoid Dandilions from the Pits of R'lyeh

Factual Questions
1

I was out of town for the first several weeks of spring and when I came back, my front yard looked like a dandilion farm. I first used Scott’s (something) fertilizer with dandilion control on them to stop them from spreading, then used a spray chemical to kill them.

Unfortunatly, 4 weeks later, they don’t seem to have died, just mutated into these weird pale things. Instead of the normal, healthy green stalks of dandilion stems, I have these awful twisted pallid tendrils creeping up (new ones are appearing, so it’s not just dead dandilions that are rotting). They’re slightly mushy, and a pale whitish/yellow and look kind of fungoid. They have almost no blossom or blossom pod on the top. Frankly I’m coming to the opinion that my only recourse is to dig up the damned things (literally, from their appearance) but don’t really want to touch them. They really do look like something out of a Lovecraft novel.

Other than diging them up (if I do, I’m wearing gloves, and, possibly a holy symbol or two) does anyone have any idea of how to get rid of them? (Chemically, not occultly. No banishment rituals, please)

Fenris

2

Pay some neighborhood 11 year old boys to dig them up for 4 bucks an hour. They’re resilient.
If you treat them chemically again, God knows what you might unleash upon the world.

3

There is a product I’ve seen which is effective called something like One Spot.

It’s a small, pen like, hand-held dispenser. You press the end of this onto the very middle of the the Dandelion and it exudes a spot of a white liquid.This stuff fries the suckers but the warnings on the container might make you prefer to use nuclear weapons.

BTW you will find this is labour intensive do a few square yards at a time and police it well.

4

Oh, yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. What happened is that the weedkiller is the kind that does what the scientists call “translocate” to the roots. The plant picks it up through its leaves, and the chemical slowly but surely moves, through natural plant respiration, etc., until it finds itself in the roots, where it then proceeds to kill the plants. It was labeled “broad-leaved weedkiller” with “2,4D”, right?

What those oogly leaves mean is that either you have really tough, healthy dandelions, or that possibly it rained within 24 hours of the application, so the plants weren’t able to pick up the full dose from their leaves. They just aren’t quite dead yet, and my experience tells me that they aren’t gonna be, either. Dandelions have been around for 65 million years, and 2,4D has only been around for 50. AFAIK, holy water and crosses don’t do a bit of good, either.

Give it another week or two, and if you eventually see new little leaves coming up from the center of the plants, give them another treatment (check the weather to make sure it’s not going to rain for 24 hours.)

Also, even if it didn’t rain on your initial application, sometimes the commercial home application fertilizer manufacturers prefer to err on the side of “less”, because they KNOW that your average Mr. Joe Homeowner is frequently going to figure, “Hey, if some is good, then more is better”, and will over-apply the stuff. So sometimes if you’re a Good Little Do-Bee and follow the instructions to the letter, you don’t get good results.

BTW, it is my experience that there isn’t enough money in the world to induce small boys to dig dandelions for longer than about 10 minutes at a stretch. The chore of digging dandelions (and plantains) is for me the single biggest argument in favor of a return to slavery.

One Spot is good, but only for a teeny little “Aunt Martha” type postage stamp front yard, that has a total of about 6 dandelions in it. Any more than about 25 dandelions and you can feel your brain rotting and the finger cramps building up. Plus the stuff is expen$ive, if you’re doing more than 6 dandelions.