Which works better to eradicate thousands of little poison oak plants?
All are small (about a millimeter to two or three millimeters in stem diameter) where they're vines so some stick up six inches to a foot to even three feet and when I pull them I can generally get another five or ten feet of under the leaves rooty vine.
They're easy to pull up out of the ground. They're easy to spray since they have a distinctive set of leaves.
But which works best for long term poison oak eradication? Pulling? Spraying? (roundup)
I have gallons of 50% roundup concentrate and a hand held pressure sprayer and I can pull the poison oak up by the vines using good gloves also (I get the rash but that's not what I'm worried about at all as I know how to clean up after contact with poison oak).
What I'm weighing are the experiences of others who want to eradicate the poison oak in one swoop, if that's even possible.
The dilemma is partly due to lack of information about how FAR roundup goes.
If I spray the leaves (which is all that sticks up from the deep leaf litter) I miss the roots entirely although roundup travels from leaves to roots to kill the plant if enough leaves are sticking up.
But these vines easily go for ten feet under the leaf litter. Does roundup travel ten feet inside a plant?
If I pull the roots anywhere I see the leaves, a different dilemma ensues as I can easily pull up the ten feet of vine but it eventually breaks leaving a lot of remaining root and no leaves to spray or even pull up on so I'd have to wait for that root to grow again for any leaves to show to hit it again.
dan snipped-for-privacy@nospam.com wrote in news:s331dm$1dft$ snipped-for-privacy@neodome.net:
I think Wade Garrett had the best answer: contact your local big nursery. The reason I say that is because I ran into the same problem, but not with poison oak, but with morning glory vine that I intentionally planted in my flower bed, and then years later wanted to get rid of. Morning glory, I found out, grows like ivy...up everything, and hard to kill.
The morning glories grew up my 20' downspout and popped out of the top, and began to grow as a hanging garden in the rain gutter. It was pretty, but clogged my downspout. It had so invaded my downspout, that I couldn't just pull it out. I had to detach the downspout from the side of the house, but also had to cut it in half to pull the vine out. I ended up replacing the downspout.
But, I still had morning glory growing in the flower bed, below. I kept pulling the thing out but it always left thin stems, like what you are experiencing with the poison oak. Each month, I had to keep pulling more out. Eventually, I tried a product called Remuda (a cousing of RoundUp, same formulation) which was very successful at another house for removing persistent weeds), but the results only lasted for a few months, and the moring glory was back.
I've finally settled on the fact that I either have to yank the thing out, or kill what I can with something like Remuda. Each couple of months, I do one or the other. Pull or spray.
I think the problem is the same as yours. The stems are so long, that the chemicals never travel that far. My stems were somethinge 20' long.
If it were me, since neither method may not work permanently, and you may have to tend to the issue every few months or so, I think I'd just spray, especially if you're area is rather large.
I live in a place where most dish garden plants can take over your yard in a couple of years. I have won the war on Brazilian peppers, air potatoes and the carrot woods are in trouble. Lesser weeds are gone. Garlon 4, mixed with diesel. Shit that won't die, dies. Just use it in a Zep bottle on fine stream and carefully shoot what you want dead. With viney stuff you might need the fan spray because every stem is a separate plant. Just watch your collateral damage.
It all just depends on how much time you want to spend killing weeds.
I think you have a good handle on the dilemma of the problem set.
The big poison oak vines (the ones that are the diameter of from a pencil to your fingers and wrist) are much easier to kill as they don't break when you pull on them so you can very easily find the mother location even if it's twenty or thirty feet away.
Those large plants die every time after you brush on or spray concentrated roundup directly immediately after cutting the vine.
The large plants are most often found on hillsides where I start at the bottom and claw my way up on my hands and knees pulling out those thick vines until I find the mother plant and kill her. I don't bother pulling out all the vines which went uphill as they'll die with the mother plant when I cut her and spray her. (It's too difficult to work downhill anyways).
What I'm asking about is a field that's relatively flat which has been untouched for as long as I know such that the forest litter is at least a foot thick. Almost every log for example falls apart when I kick it as it's a moist area what has a very thick layer of "compost" which these little baby poison oaks seem to love.
It's about an acre that I'm looking at which is easy as it's not too big but it's still time consuming no matter what method I use and I don't really want to kill any of the oaks and moss and blackberries and other natural plants in the process either.
Given there are thousands of these little baby poison oak plants what I may do unless someone has a better idea is both methods. I haven't tried both but maybe I should spray the babies that I can see and in a week or two come back and pull them out by the vines.
The only problem I can see ahead of time that I may run into is if the leaves fall off I won't be able to discern what's a mm-wide poison oak vine from any other vine for the babies that are only a few inches above the leaf litter.
For the vines that stand up a few feet or which start to grow up the moss covered oaks it will be easier as poison oak is just about the only vine in this field that grows straight up out of the ground as a standing vine.
It seems your experience is similar to mine in that the trick is to figure out a way to get the poison to travel long distances along the vine.
I couldn't find anything in the literature that says how long roundup travels inside the stem when you spray the leaves.
What's the tallest plant you've been able to kill with roundup concentrate?
dan snipped-for-privacy@nospam.com wrote in news:s359ov$1nab$ snipped-for-privacy@neodome.net:
I do indeed understand the problem. But, I think you may have me mixed up with BobF's solution. BobF inserted leafless stems in little, poison containing bottles for a period of time. This worked for BobF. I have yet to get rid of my morning glory by either pulling or poison. The most effective for me has been pulling back to the mother plant, and spraying the newer, youngsters. The morning glory is no longer a big problem, even though it keeps coming back, but slowly.
Great growing soil.
When I've used a spray, I've never had the leaves fall off. They just turn yellow and hang on. I just sprayed some taller, leafy weeds on my hillside (I needed to wear snow crampons to avoid sliding down the steep hillside, and there's no snow here) about ten days ago. They are all yellow, with leaves still attached to the stems.
Nope. You understand that spraying baby leaves may not get the concentrate the ten feet to the mother plant in these tiny millimeter diameter vines.
With larger vines like those the thickness of a shovel handle, you can pull all you want the twenty or thirty feet which leads to the mother plant.
Once you have the mother plant, it's usually only a foot or two wide at the base where you cut and then immediately spray the ten or twenty thick vines that go in all directions, and that kills the plant every time.
There's no way with thousands of these that you'll be using little bottles!
For thousands of plants?
I have eliminated entire hillsides of poison oak in the past but I use heavier equipment (like a chainsaw and a rented tiller).
What is different with these little babies is they're so delicate.
Yes. Pulling only works though if the vines don't break first.
This is true. I mostly spray cut stems but when I overspray, I can see brown patches around where I've oversprayed so this may be the case with these baby poison oaks. I can upload a picture of them if I knew how.
I think what I'll do is spray the thousands of baby plants and then a week later pull them until the thin vines break (these vines will always break before I can get to the mother plant as they're six inches or more under the top of the leaf litter but I can often get ten feet of vine before it breaks).
I go with Roundup, but get the Walmart version in the gallon container with the battery-operated sprayer which is MUCH cheaper than the official stuff. I had a euphorbia infestation which succumbed nicely to chemical attack -- a few survivors hid behind the ivy, but when they got tall enough to see I pulled them out and danced naked around their corpses. Well, I wanted to, anyway...
It does NOTHING against Algerian ivy, though. If you have that stuff you have to either dig it up or burn it, and I'm not so sure about burning it.
Morning glory produces lots of seeds. You have to keep killing and killing and killing...
Around here they die with the first frost, but sometimes they survive if they're in a protected location and/or we have a mild winter. I've had tomato plants that lived a second year..
Long ago I bought seeds for the purple ones. They're pretty civilized and don't mind living in a pot. The blue ones are VERY different -- my friend's neighborhood's back fences are covered with the damn things, which eventually die and look really ratty. They probably think that Roundup is evil...
The Real Bev snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news:s35qhm$84d$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
Yep. I had the blue ones, and besides climbing out of the flowerbed and around, up, and into my downspout (20") and out the top and growing out of my 2nd story gutter, they began to grow across the top of my garage doors. Looked nice, but hung down and got caught in the top of the doors whenever opened. The twice daily parade of deer in the area liked to eat the flowers off, but they always came back.
Therer are a few homes in the neighborhood that (mistakenly, like me) planted the blue ones at the foot of their fences. The fences, within two years, had lots of vines growing over the fence tops, with lots of dead material.
There's a telephone pole here, about 30', that is completely enveloped with morning glory. The utility department came along and cut it down, and had to unwrap it from the pole.
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