They are an annual and you can just remove the plant once it does its "pretty flowers" thing. I hate to be a doom sayer . . . but I'd toss the plant and put out weed inhibitor. As beautiful as that first alyssum is the three million that will come up over the next ten years become a real bother.

Alyssum is an annual that does reseed prolifically. You can put down a pre-emergent as suggested above or let it reseed, but it may not always reseed where you want it to.

Just let them be. Really. They actually last several years for me. I use them as groundcover and they bloom almost the whole year for me, setting seeds almost all year long. I never cut them back so they form a nice thick, drought tolerant groundcover mat and keep other weeds at bay.

Hi,

Thanks for cross-posting this. I was going to give it a day or two in the roll call thread and then move it into its own thread, so thanks.

Appreciate everyone's input on alyssium, I'll have to re-read them. Looks like doing nothing will work, but I still wonder if I should remove the ugly scraggly brown bundles that are all over,....or if they are best left as groundcover during rainy season.

just for the record here is my original question:

>I'll toss out one little question here that is on my mind today - anyone know much about Sweet Alyssium? Much of the large front yard (that was lawn a decade or more ago) bloomed beautiful little Alyssium flowers in about March or April, and over the summer it has grown to about a foot long and is scraggly, and brown (we didn't and still don't really have irrigation sorted out). My questions are: will the Alyssium regrow, or seed itself so will it regrow? Should I leave in place the long brown bushy piles that are left all around the yard, to keep from having bare dirt in the rainy season, or should I cut them back or pull them out? If I want more in the spring (it's a convenient ground cover until we have time to make a better plan) do I need to buy and put out seed? etc.

Some people mow and they send out new growth rapidly.

If you have lots of seedlings they will quickly replace the scragglies if you pull them out.

I routinely pull out the parent plants when they become unsightly. By that time they have scattered new seed.

Like iris_gal, I pull them out when they start to look ratty and seedlings replace the old ones. This is a big staple in my yard, because the pollen feeds beneficial insects when the aphids are not around to feed them. Then when aphids do show up, they are quickly eaten. I rub out unwanted seedlings with my foot. Such a handy plant.

I have had a bunch of Alyssum for about 3 years. When I first had them they would flower, the parent plant would die and then new seedlings would come up some time after I removed the dead parent plant. Now that they are well established, there is a constant cycle of re-seeding, so I barely even notice when the parent plant dies as the new ones emerge so frequently. It's a great border plant and needs very little water. They occasionally come up in different places in my landscape via re-seeding, but they haven't gotten out of control.

-Brett