Any suggestions on getting rid of sandspurs?

Long story short a dirt road was put right next to this land many years ago as a driveway to the neighbors place. They imported sand to do so thus bringin in the sandspurs. I live in a place that was once a pine forest but has long since been cleared.

Anyone have any suggestions on what to do?

I'm currently cutting the buds off when I see them & occassionaly uprooting some. Because I don't want to mow this part of the yard many wild herbs such as dandelions, buttercups, clovers,  nice grasses & groundcovers are slowly reclaiming the area.
Should I maybe add some fresh chicken manure where the sandspurs where? How about watering the area?
Also anyone reccommend any [other] plants that would be beneficial to the soil & spread quickly?
I live in eastern NC on a small island.

Cheers!

Oh yeah! I've been thinking about possibly adopting a goat but that wouldn't happen until next year.

Frequent mowing will help some-take down the grass before it is able to produce seed.  It's not a complete fix as some of the bolts will grow flat, below the mower blade.  At least mowing keeps it from spreading too fast.

In my experience, walking around barefoot is guaranteed to find every sandspur in a field!

One thing I hear a lot is to drag a burlap sack around the yard to try to pick up the sand burs.  I would imagine you would want to weigh it down as well.  Doing this along with pulling the nasty buggers as they appear will slowly decrease the population.  I don't know how much goats would enjoy them.  Mine seem to prefer anything broadleaf (weeds & trees) to grasses.

I purchased a home last year, here near Fayetteville, NC, and the backyard was slam full of sandspurs and every other weed known to man (it was a foreclosure).

I've spent the past year renovating the back and front lawn (as well as the inside of the house). I thought about every conceivable way to get rid of those sandspurs and almost went as far as plowing the whole backyard with a tracter or something and starting from scratch. However, I was also afraid that the sandspurs would just get mixed around and end up sprouting again once I've planted new grass.

Then I was discussing this with my father in-law who owns a landscaping business mowing lawns and stuff. He suggested I use his johndeer mower with this vacuum attachment that is on it that has a separate motor that vacuums up anything you mow into this big bagger that is pulled behind the mower. So I went and got it from him and used it on the backyard. When I did it, I put the mower blades all the way to the ground as low as they would go. I even took the wheels off the deck so it would lay on the ground. The blades were actually mowing the dirt and everything got sucked up into the bagger. This is a pretty big back yard so I had to empty the bagger thing numerous times.

I did this in April and then put down my grass seed and proceeded to water it everyday for about 3 weeks.  After I mowed it and sucked everything up, I couldn't really find hardly any sand spurs out there. Before I could take 3 steps and my flipflops would have tons of them stuck on them.

Since then, my grass came back great and I didn't have any spurs until about a month ago for some reason some started coming back (I guess august is when they start sprouting?). So first I sprayed the back lawn with Image herbicide. It says it kills sandspurs and it's safe for centipede grass. After that, since there weren't too many sprouting, I decided the best thing to do with these was pull them up using a weed popper. The entire plant and roots comes up pretty easily. After I pulled what I could see, I then mowed my lawn at about 1 inch and used my regular bagger attachment to collect all the clippings to catch any spurs that I missed. I figured any I didn't pull would die from the spray and I would just pull any others that I see from here on out. It's been about 3 weeks and I haven't seen any new ones sprouting.

Hope this helps. These things are a beast to get rid of.

If you're talking about a very large area, you're only option may be to just spray it all with the image stuff, and maybe do it a couple of times a season for a year or two and you'll probably eventually get them all. The problem is, you can only kill the plants with the spray, but the spurs are still there and will probably sprout again the next season, so you really need to try and get them up as well.

Don Quijote's battle against the windmills. This is just sad, dude. Seriously.

Thanks for the suggestions folk.

Like I said dandelions & other herbs are reclaiming that area so I think all will be well. I like the burlap sack idea!

@ Dunkelheit I'm not sure if that was directed towards me or the previous commenter but either way that was pretty harsh & not helpful..

My comment was meant for bhughes and Yes it was unhelpful. I apologize.

I'm not sure about goats though. I know near to no plant goats won't eat but sand spur is known to damage animals mouths. Or am I mistaken?

Dunkelheit wrote:
My comment was meant for bhughes and Yes it was unhelpful. I apologize.

I'm not sure about goats though. I know near to no plant goats won't eat but sand spur is known to damage animals mouths. Or am I mistaken?

All is well. It did seem like they where spending A LOT of time, energy & other resources for their battle....

I'm not sure about the goats either. That's a good point
I've personally chewed up a few of the [still green] spurs and as long as they don't stick into yer gums or in between your teeth they can be easily ground up. I've found that a flour can be made from the seed [excluding the spur-shell]

Goats have larger teeth than us right? But then again they don't have fingers they can use if a spur did get stuck in an unwanted place..

Most of the spurs are gone now but I'll have to see in the spring time how many are left & deal with 'em in my neighbors yard [who keeps it mowed so no other tall grasses or herbs can overgrow the spurs].

Normally it is quite efficient to brushcut unwanted plants when their seeds are not ripe yet. Do you have a brush cutter?