I think your best bet would be to trade me some of those agave babies for some san pedro cactus babies. :)

Happily. You can come by and dig them up.

A. americana are notorious for this. All you can do is keep your spade sharp and cut them off as soon as they pop up. Or you can swap them out for a species that doesn't pup as much like A. franzosinii.

I bet your starting to understand why so many people despise weed fabric.

The concrete barrier wont help. They'll eat it.

I didn’t know that many people despise weed cloth. It certainly is a problem around the agaves. It makes it difficult to trim the pups in time but on the other hand it keeps all other weeds at bay. I have a 6 acre property; thus, containing weeds is a big issue. Are there better solutions than weed cloth? I would greatly appreciate an easier solution.

it will keep the weeds at bay for a couple years then enough dirt will have accumulated on the surface for weeds to grow above the fabric. then the roots grow down through the fabric and tear it apart. Once that happens, have fun removing the fabric. The only place I ever tell clients to put it is under gravel pathways where they can either spray herbicide or use a weed torch.

The best solution to weeds is to perform multiple grow/kill cycles when preparing beds and then getting the beds covered as quickly as possibly with vegetation. And mulch lots and lots of mulch. Some, like the Garden Professors, recommend a minimum of 6 inches and when dealing with acreage a foot. But the true secret is to never let the weeds go to seed.

Nil13: Thank you for the good input. Much appreciated. Yes, I’ve been trying to prevent the weeds from seeding; but, admittedly, we have been only about 70 percent successful. Too many weeds in too many places. And it doesn’t help that the neighboring property is wilderness with seeds abundantly blowing onto ours. I think your advice regarding the weed cloths under paths and sprayable areas only is a good one. I’ll save myself the work and expense of laying a mile of weed cloth in the future. On the topic of mulching: is there a particularly good kind of mulch I should use? My experiences with mulching have been dismal. The 5 trucks I’ve brought in were wildly contaminated and brought in all sorts of non native weeds.

Nil13: I just looked up a few weed torch clips on youtube thanks to your suggestion. I had never heard about it. I’m afraid that won’t work here. I live in an extreme wildfire hazard zone with nothing but wilderness around me with much Tojon and chaparral. Torching the weeds may indeed work - too well. There is a high risk that ALL will be gone. Do you have any other suggestions for large scale weed control? My gardens and orchard are organic; I have reserved the roundup for the driveway.

Mowing and mulch is probably your best option.

When you order mulch (from an arborist) you have to specify 'no brush clearance, tree trimming only.' However, are you sure that the weeds came in with the mulch? I hear that all the time with mulch that I have never had a weed seed in. People plant a bed and mulch and when the weed seeds that were in the soil sprout because they were brought to the surface by the cultivation, they erroneously blame the mulch.

Nil13: I’ll definitely need a clean source for mulch. Contamination is easy to check here. I live in a wilderness area - pristine - bordering an ecological reserve and the Cleveland National Forest. My property was an undeveloped mountain top. If all of a sudden I have in the areas where I mulched - and only in those areas - species growing that do not grow in this area including a very invasive kind of sunflower, then I conclude it came in with the mulch. Thanks for the advice on what to ask for.

Solitary Agaves are a better choice than A. americana, which is very weedy here. Agaves that are solitary in natural habitat will often produce one or only a few offsets in cultivation and not make a pest of themselves.

It's a good idea to always be careful with free plants--research what you are getting. Free can end up costing a lot in work or removal. A neighbor planted some free palms and got tired of paying $100 apiece to have them trimmed every year, and ultimately more than that to have them removed. They were not "free" after all.

hoov: thank you; that’s good advice that I should have heeded before I adopted them. Learned my lesson.