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Ok, I admit I could be wrong about this, although I’ve read this advice in more than one gardening magazine. Still, I’m not seeing in your cites a direct comparison between applying to leaves and applying to a cut stump. Some are saying that if a plant is already cut, applying glyphosate will kill the stump. Others talk about trees, for which it may be impractical to apply the herbicide directly to leaves. I would also think common sense dictates that if you want a plant to absorb a chemical, you apply it to as large a surface area as possible, and the tiny cut end of a vine stem doesn’t seem the best avenue to achieve that. But I withdraw my original statement.
–Mark
So which do you think is more reliable? On the one hand gardening magazines. On the other the chemical manufacturers and the extension division of every major university and every state and national agriculture department in the western world.
Well, no, you wouldn’t see that because they aren’t comparison trials. They are instructions on how to apply cut stump. If you want to see comparisons you need to look for studies comparing methods.
Of course this is all rather tangential to the point at hand, which is that cut stump application of Roundup has been proven effective and recommended by the chemical manufacturers and the extension division of every major university and every state and national agriculture department in the western world.
Which is exactly what everyone in this thread is also saying.
Just as it is impractical to apply the herbicide directly to leaves of ivy, and for exactly the same reasons.
With Glyphosate, you don’t want the plant to absorb as much herbicide as possible. You want the *roots *to absorb the *minimum *amount herbicide to kill them. Anything else is wasteful and inefficient. Any poison absorbed by enzymes in the crown of the plant is wasted because it is only by killing the roots that you kill the plant. Any amount of poison above that needed to kill the roots is similarly wasted.
Goats would eat it.
I think Duckster and the Merry Macs have it right. 
There is something that kills Ivy better than strong glyphosate
Its Ammonium Sulfamate.mavailable in stores in uk as compost accelerator, otherwise banned for killing of plants. Use it, it does the job well. I know as i have used it.
Ah, but is it available in the good ol’ USA? I could have used it in some of my yard work…
Half of our yard was covered in ivy when we moved in. We pulled it all up by the roots and laid woodchips down. It’s work to do, but it never came back.
I have three questions:
- How much square footage did the ivy cover?
- How much time did it take?
- About how thick were the stumps at the thickest?
I pulled out an ivy hedge a bunch of years ago. I kept trying to cut it back, but it was too powerful for my puny efforts. I attacked it with a pick mattock, a shovel and a big steel drilling bit of some kind that I use as a pry bar. The hedge was approximately 3 feet wide, three feet high and about twenty feet long. I don’t remember exactly how thick it was. Not really a stump. Just a twist of vine. After several days of rather intensive effort, I was left with a hole in the ground that was three feet wide, three feet deep and about 20 feet long. Them roots is a bitch.
Isn’t they?
Actually–and I started a thread myself about this–years ago I tried clearing a shallow slope of ivy for a customer. I didn’t do very well at it; the customer wasn’t fazed, however. She proceeded with her original plan, to plant her own garden on the slope where the ivy was. I guess the plants she put in are quite hardy–in all these years the ivy has never grown back. 