Organic herbicide?

Is there such a thing I've tried the gluten thing it was a waste of time and money. My two big problems are horsetail and chickweed most of the other stuff I can keep up with by pulling it.

The thing with horsetail is it shows there is boggy soggy ground, either a bowly collective kind of spot, or a spring maybe. Something you'll have to address depending on what you want to grow there. Mounded hugelkulture beds seem to be good solutions for that.

The thing with "weeds" is that once you address the conditions that make it favorable for that weed, and "correct" them, the conditions change and the weed is not so happy and wont' sprout so easily.

Chickweed isn't a big deal, just keep hoeing it or pulling it(if you want, you can eat it too), and plant your other plants. They will eventually shade out the chickweed and it will get scarcer.

The horsetail shows another condition that will be harder to address--the boggyness.

FOr instance, all around my garden in the open area there are tons of thistles, but in my garden(forest structure) there are hardly any thistles and what do come up are spindly. So conditions for growing thistle are very different within my garden, than in the "same" ground a few feet away where they thrive (or, they aren't scarce in my garden for lack of seed blowing around).

couldn 't have said it better...two organic herbicides are boiling water and fire

They used to have a gizmo for the PTO on a tractor that was a generator hooked up to cables. It was designed to zap emergent weeds and grasses that grow taller than the crop. Claimed it zapped them all the way to the root and turned the whole thing into mush. Though I never seen one, just read about it in old magazines.

Boiling water. Even better, use chickens, pigs, goats, etc.

Emile Spore wrote:
They used to have a gizmo for the PTO on a tractor that was a generator hooked up to cables. It was designed to zap emergent weeds and grasses that grow taller than the crop. Claimed it zapped them all the way to the root and turned the whole thing into mush. Though I never seen one, just read about it in old magazines.

My electric fence will kill the leaves of my Sunroots.

Horsetails come up from rhizomes/runners, boiling water won't do anything, they'll just send up new ones.

Tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima) produces a fairly powerful herbicide, which can be extracted from the bark of its roots year-round. This chemical (or combination of chemicals) is apparently present in the leaves to varying degrees based on time of year, IIRC it's at a maximum around October.

hmm.  I've been planting chickweed (Stellaria media) as a cover between vegetables.  works pretty well.

folks eat horsetail as well, though I've never heard anybody rave about it.  it does have a nice Paleozoic look to it.

but you didn't ask what I liked about your weeds, you asked how to get rid of them.  and I am no help there.