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)

On Fri, 19 Mar 2021 18:26:30 -0200, dan posted for all of us to digest...


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)

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=poi...control&ia=web

--
Tekkie

On 3/19/2021 4:26 PM, dan wrote:
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'd go with Roundup or similar. Pulling has the risk of getting the
stuff on you and leaving behind roots to grow again.

On 3/19/21 4:26 PM, dan wrote:
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've had success with several different brands of brush killer spray.
Home center stores and nurseries carry a variety of them.

You might want to check with a knowledgeable guy at the biggest nursery
in your area for which brands do best against your local flavor of
poison oak.

--
The left knows the answer is gun control; they just don't know what the
question is.
- Newt Gingrich

On Fri, 19 Mar 2021 17:22:38 -0400, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

I'd go with Roundup or similar. Pulling has the risk of getting the
stuff on you and leaving behind roots to grow again.

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.

Hence my dilemma.

On Fri, 19 Mar 2021 18:26:49 -0400, Wade Garrett wrote:


I've had success with several different brands of brush killer spray.

Roundup works fine to kill almost anything it touches.
That's not the problem.

The problem is if I use the roundup, the chemical has to travel ten feet or
more from every leaf to kill the entire plant.

*Does roundup travel ten or more feet inside a 2mm diameter root vine*?

If I pull the vines out where the leaves pop up the problem changes to one
of leaving many bits and pieces of broken root all over the place.

It's essentially a question of experience.

On 3/19/2021 6:28 PM, Boris wrote:
dan wrote in :

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 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.


I had good results on blackberry by cutting off the end of a stem and
immersing it in a plastic container of roundup with a cover to protect
from rain and evaporation. It did seem to kill back to the root.

On Fri, 19 Mar 2021 18:26:30 -0200, dan wrote:

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)

If you really want to kill it use Garlon (or Ortho Brush B gone full
strength) triclopyr

On Fri, 19 Mar 2021 19:13:05 -0700, Bob F wrote:

On 3/19/2021 6:28 PM, Boris wrote:
dan wrote in :

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 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.


I had good results on blackberry by cutting off the end of a stem and
immersing it in a plastic container of roundup with a cover to protect
from rain and evaporation. It did seem to kill back to the root.

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. **** 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.

On Sat, 20 Mar 2021 01:28:35 -0000 (UTC), Boris wrote:


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.

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?

On 3/19/2021 11:13 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 19 Mar 2021 18:26:30 -0200, dan wrote:

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)

If you really want to kill it use Garlon (or Ortho Brush B gone full
strength) triclopyr


Looking into thread and google, that is what I would use and early
season looks best.

My only experience was with poison ivy using 2,4-D and English ivy with
Roundup. I needed more spraying with Roundup to wipe out the ivy.

On 3/19/2021 4:26 PM, dan wrote:
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)


Rent some goats.

On Sat, 20 Mar 2021 17:54:23 -0000 (UTC), Boris wrote:


I do indeed understand the problem. But, I think you may have me mixed up
with BobF's solution.

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!

BobF inserted leafless stems in little, poison
containing bottles for a period of time.

For thousands of plants?

This worked for BobF. I have
yet to get rid of my morning glory by either pulling or poison.

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.

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.

Yes. Pulling only works though if the vines don't break first.

When I've used a spray, I've never had the leaves fall off.

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).

On Sat, 20 Mar 2021 15:06:21 -0400, Billy Ghote wrote:


Rent some goats.

I realize you're joking but neighbors DO have goats.
They jokingly told me if I put up a fence, I can borrow them.

The fence would be too expensive.
I wonder if goats can be leashed in woody hilly terrain?

On 03/19/2021 02:22 PM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 3/19/2021 4:26 PM, dan wrote:
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'd go with Roundup or similar. Pulling has the risk of getting the
stuff on you and leaving behind roots to grow again.

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.

--
Cheers, Bev
When you stop bitching you start dying.

On 03/19/2021 06:28 PM, Boris wrote:

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.

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...

--
Cheers, Bev
When you stop bitching you start dying.

On Fri, 19 Mar 2021 21:39:03 -0200, dan posted for all of us to digest...


On Fri, 19 Mar 2021 17:22:38 -0400, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

I'd go with Roundup or similar. Pulling has the risk of getting the
stuff on you and leaving behind roots to grow again.

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.

Hence my dilemma.

Hey Arlen, is this YOU? HA HA

--
Tekkie

On Sat, 20 Mar 2021 19:25:02 -0200, dan posted for all of us to digest...


On Sat, 20 Mar 2021 17:54:23 -0000 (UTC), Boris wrote:


I do indeed understand the problem. But, I think you may have me mixed up
with BobF's solution.

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!

BobF inserted leafless stems in little, poison
containing bottles for a period of time.

For thousands of plants?

This worked for BobF. I have
yet to get rid of my morning glory by either pulling or poison.

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.

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.

Yes. Pulling only works though if the vines don't break first.

When I've used a spray, I've never had the leaves fall off.

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).

Hey Arlen, where are all the pixs you like to post?

--
Tekkie