I am very tired of Poison Ivy. This vine pictured below is our main culprit in spreading it everywhere because it is so mature and is covered with berries every fall. Then the birds eat them and poop the seeds all over the place!
Not a day goes by that I don't find a bunch more seedlings to pull or spray. It is my number one most prevalent weed in the landscape.
Its in the mulch
Its in the ground cover
Its on the deck.
And those are just what I found walking around in five minutes when I realized "I need some photos to illustrate this"... after pulling and spraying all week.
That vine doesn't look like such a big deal until you put a person beside it for scale. It has engulfed the entire dead Ash tree and forty feet up. Luckily the next door neighbor is not allergic to it (yet). So he gets elected to deal with it whenever we are cutting trees. Neither my husband nor I will ever pick up the neighbor's chain saw. And just watching gives us the heebie jeebies.
About the only thing you can do with a vine this big is try to cut off its food and hope it stops thriving and eventually dies. The main root has a million little hair roots that cling to the tree bark and get moisture from the surface. We decided to try cutting out a section of the roots to see if we can at least discourage it.
That's not the only dead Ash tree we have that is covered in Ivy.
We had a go at several others.
Neighbor Mike pulls out a section of root. And it looks like there is a hunk right out of the tree. But that is just Ivy root.
Poison Ivy is pretty hard to discourage. I'll let you know if the leaves ever begin to wilt.
So glad we do not have PI to contend with here. It grows well in the limestone bedrock area to the south of us, and sometimes shows up when gravel has been transported for roadwork. So far, so good. I have never seen it as such a vigorous vine.
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