I’ve trotted out this nugget before: stories about poison ivy / oak always remind me of a buddy I had in college.
He said that as a kid, he and his friend came up with a sure-fire way to get out of school: they took off their shirts and clad only in shorts, they rolled around in a patch of poison oak.
It worked! They got out of school for several days but had to spend most their waking hours submerged in a salt-water / baking soda bath while experiencing the most wretched form of misery -wanting to scratch one’s entire skin-covered hide off of one’s body.
He chalked this up to the absolute-stupidest-thing-he-had-ever-done-in-his-life but had at least gotten it out of the way before his age entered double-digits.
I’ll be keeping a close watch on this thread. We have poison ivy that we’re going to need to attack (I keep saying “we” but I’m not touching the stuff-my onetime exposure was bad enough to make me take steroids). Dadio doesn’t seem to have problems with it so he can take care of it.
Not everyone is allergic to Poison Ivy. I am not in the least but my wife and daughters are. I have had to deal with thousands of them on our 2 1/2 acres. I weed-whack them or just pull them up by hand. People keep telling me that an allergy could start at any time but it hasn’t happened in over 30 years of exposure. However, I once came in from yard work and rubbed my wife’s back by request. Bad, bad move. The welts took weeks to heal. Maybe you could find someone that isn’t allergic to get rid of it. I think that I once read that includes about 30% of the population (no cite).
This strongly correlates with my personal experience. *Most if not all *will have a problem eventually. “Eventually” might take more years than you have, and if so count your blessings, man! But anyone else not so well blessed might be prudent to use precautions, e.g. gloves, long sleeves, long pants, and so on.
Or you could undercut my first billion from me by hiring yourself out cheaper than my goats. Your call!
I came here tonight to post about poison ivy. Funny.
Last year I was exposed in mid-June, in a couple of places; after two weeks, it had spread all over my body, & I was finally put on steroids.
THIS year I was exposed in in early May, & it cleared up in 7 days, with significantly less discomfort.
I used Technu Extreme Medicated Poison Ivy Scrub, with Grindelia robusta. It alleviated the itching for ~ 4 - 6 hours at a time, and checked the spreading*. I used as directed, but let it sit on my skin for a extra ~ 15 seconds. (They label it a ‘homeopathic remedy’, but it has been known as an herbal remedy for rashes for at least a century.)
I suspect poison ivy may be less poisonous earlier in the year, but I can’t find any study on that.
I seem to have successfully eradicated one (small) patch by spraying the leaves one week, and tearing up the the plant ROOTS & ALL the following week. (I haven’t a clue what I used; I hate herbicides.)
I tore up the stuff suited up for a clean room: hair bonnet, face mask, Tyvek bunny suit, latex gloves under leather gloves, and even shoe covers.
‘They’ say poison ivy rashes do not spread after you wash the exposed areas; well it did on me.
The doctor who finally gave my the steroids suggested the first rash is always the worst.
I suspect that peoples susceptibility to poison ivy changes throughout their lives. When I was a kid, I was known for tromping through fields of poison ivy and coming out clean. While I can’t definitively connect my recent rashes with poison anything, they were very typical for poison ivy rashes. Luckily, I’m not horribly sensitive, but as far as I’m concerned I could become horribly sensitive at any moment. Even when I knew I didn’t react, I avoided it like the plague. I would never recommend anybody deliberately contact poison ivy no matter what they thought about their immunity.
The legendary JillGat once had a pet goat which met this description, and she did indeed loan it out to friends. The thread where she mentioned it was from January of 2000, though, so it’s probably not around any more.
Meanwhile, it was common knowledge in Boy Scouts that the first symptoms would show up about an hour after exposure, and if you immediately washed thoroughly as soon as you got that first hint of an itch, you’d be OK. Last I knew, I was one of those lucky ones who doesn’t get a reaction, but it was over a decade ago that I last tested that, so who knows, now?
I was always the one to de-ivy the campsite at pennsic, I am one of the minute number of natural immunes …
but then again I cover up, and wash off immediately - no sense getting any excess exposure. We figured out that I was a natural immune when I went off the side of the road and peed when our car died, and when we went back for it we noticed the huge patch of poison ivy bowering the area I went and peed in :smack:
I swear by the stuff, too, but it’s much better to use as soon as you know you’ve been exposed, before you’ve broken out in a rash. In my experience, nothing’s better at washing off the oily urushiol. I asked my pharmacist what the best stuff was and before he could answer, two old Cajun ladies took me by the arm, dragged me down the aisle, and said, “Cher, this is the only stuff to buy.” They were right.
I’ve never tried this method to remove poison ivy, but some of the old timers swear by it when the poison ivy surrounds plants you don’t want to expose to RoundUp (or whatever) by spraying indiscriminately, yet you’re too sensitive to tear the stuff out yourself. Pour an inch or two of RoundUp into several tin cans, then use clothes pins to pin several of the poison ivy leaves into each of the cans, making sure they’re submerged by the RoundUp. Theoretically, the leaves will suck up the poison, eventually to the roots.
As I’ve said, I’ve never tried it, and have a hard time believing it would work with the woody mature plants.
Technu (if homeopathic is wrong, I don’t want to be right) is effective. Just wanted to get that vote in.
I’ve had some success and some failures removing poison. In one case I had a vine growing up into a tree. Cutting the vine at ground level and again at 10 feet up killed the plant and removed the part where anyone can routinely touch. That plant has not come back but the vine is still wrapped up in the tree. This also gave me the worst case of poison ivy that I’ve ever had. My forearm swelled up to twice it’s normal size. You got to love it when you go to the Dr. and he is calling the associates in to ‘have a look at this’.
I also had poison growing rampant throughout my grape vines. In this case I used roundup on the ivy plant and also manually removed the poison vine. Lastly, I covered the bed in weed block and mulch. I occasionally get new poison ivy plants coming up in the bed where the grape vine lives. These I believe are roundup resistant so before they get too big I either weedwack or pull them up. It’s a hardy plant however if you pull the plant up year after year it will eventually stop coming back.
I have one area that is covered in poison, Virginia creeper and other weeds. I’ve roundup-ed this area multiple times and I may as well be watering the poison. It thrives here. In this area, I’m considering getting a professional.
Technu does have a homeopathic claim, and that’s bogus. But in reality, it’s a wash consisting of Alcohol (.55%), SD Alcohol 40B (7.05%%), Benzethonium Chloride (added as a preservative). It washes off the urushiol by using “micro-beads”, and no homeopathic claims are nessesary to make the “inactive” ingredients work. A number of more or less legit but really not homeopathic remedies use a “homeopathic” label to get around FDA regs.
I can guarantee you that the “Grindelia Robusta 3x” has little medical use, although “3X” is only 1/1000 and might have some potential herbal benefit. Of course, if one beleive in homeopathy, the less active ingrediate, the stronger, thus once you have diluted the Grindelia Robusta to the point where there’s only one drop in an ocean of water, you get very strong medicine.
"[edit] Swimming pool
One illustration of dilutions used in common homeopathic remedies involves comparing a homeopathic dilution to dissolving the therapeutic substance in a swimming pool.[1] One example, inspired by a problem found in a set of popular algebra textbooks, states that there are on the order of 1032 molecules of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool[2] and if such a pool were filled with a 15C homeopathic remedy, to have a 63% chance of consuming at least one molecule of the original substance, one would need to swallow 1% of the volume of such a pool, or roughly 25 metric tons of water.[3][4][5]
[edit] Equivalent physical scale of dilution
For further perspective, 1 ml of a solution which has gone through a 30C dilution is mathematically equivalent to 1 ml diluted into a cube of water measuring 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 metres per side, which is about 106 light years. Thus, homeopathic remedies of standard potencies contain, almost certainly, only water (or alcohol, as well as sugar and other nontherapeutic ingredients). Homeopaths maintain that this water retains some “essential property” of the original material, because the preparation has been shaken after each dilution.[6] Hahnemann believed that the dynamisation or shaking of the solution caused a “spirit-like” healing force to be released from within the substance. Even though the homeopathic remedies are often extremely diluted, homeopaths maintain that a healing force is retained by these homeopathic preparations.[5]"
This is true. Horses, goats, sheep, cows and chickens all love poison ivy, and aren’t affected by it. It can be a problem if you’re going to milk them. (Not the chickens. Chicken milk is disgusting.)
The stuff I originally posted about actually alleviates symptoms of the active rash. It’s not the wash, it’s the scrub. It has an herbal component to alleviate itching grindelia rubosta (I think).
I use it on any hives I get, including mosquito bites. I seem to have some hypersensitivity to skin irritants, and Technu extreme is the only topical material that has worked for me.
Don’t let the homeopathic label fool you; this stuff works.
My husband uses this stuff, and it works. He used it on the back fence at our former residence, and it’s still clear, more than 3 years later. He said that although the label tells you to dilute it, use it full strength and it will kill any poison ivy. But DO NOT let children or pets around it for a few days. He also said that there’s a commercial version that’s even stronger, which can be ordered if a store doesn’t have it in stock. (He owns a handyman and landscaping company, so he sort of knows what he’s talking about.)
I had a LOT of experience with this. Our property had lots of poison ivy in the back, growing up trees, etc. It took a couple of years to get rid of all of it, but it can be done, you just have to be persistent.
First, pull down the vines that are climbing your trees. (If leaves are not out, you can identify them by the fuzzy stalks).
Then, use the poison mentioned above (Ortho Max Poison Ivy…). When I used it it had a different name (Ortho Brush-B-Gon) but it’s the same ingredient. On a sunny day, spray all the poison ivy leaves in the morning, and then spray again in the afternoon.
Repeat every week for a couple of weeks.
If you see new plants coming up, or new leaves on the old vines, then you probably have deep roots that you need to pull up. We had 10 to 20 foot long shallow roots travelling horizontally. You can also detect them if there’s a linear pattern of new growth that might indicate a long root underneath. You have to pull these up manually.
Then just keep repeating the process.
I tried to be careful to limit the spray only to the poison ivy plants, because I did not want to kill the other vegetation, and I was pretty successful. My property did not look like a warzone. After the entire process was over with, I’d occasionally see some coming up (from birds distributing the seeds, etc.) and then would spray again.
