Some mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging subhuman had the rotten idea of planting English ivy in one of the beds behind our house, oh, 50 or so years ago. Until we moved in, it apparently went completely wild and uncontrolled, forming a demonic mat of vegetation that threatened to engulf the driveway, nearby trees, parked cars, and random pets and passers-by.
Well, sir, my wife and I decided to get out there and pull that shit up this weekend.
The good news: we did it. I have no illusions that we’re actually finished. We’ll be fighting this battle for years. But for now, the evil mutant alien BASTARD vine is gone from 99.9% of our bed. I moved hundreds and hundreds of pounds of ivy down to the curb.
The bad news: Neither my wife nor myself will be able to move for most of the week. Ouch.
I fully expect to wake up tomorrow morning, and the flower bed will look like we never pulled a stem of ivy. Rotten, miserable fucking plant.
I had a similar experience once with Morning Glorys. which at least have the decency to have pretty flowers. But gone wild they’re an utter pain ( not to mention a fire hazard ).
My current abode has both Bougainvillea ( side yards, on fences ) and Trumpet Creepers ( back yard, well house and garage ) and both are very pretty and aggressive ( the trumpet vines are very aggressive ). I keep them for the looks, but they have to be savagely pruned at least once a year. The trumpet Creeper in particular regularly threatens to outstrangle my Kiwi ( also a fairly aggressive vine - hey, come to think of it, I’ve got a lot of these things ) and engulf my Mexican Palm.
If you want to remove the remaining unsightly little hairy rootlets from your walls, I recommend getting some professional in who will sand your walls for you. I don’t know the proper word, someone who will spray the wall with a high-pressured mix of water and sand. That made our walls as new.
Due to the cost of raspberries and my wife’s liking for them, shortly after we bought our house I planted four raspberry canes in our back yard. Within a few years they were threatening to take over. A well-meaning friend had offered to help us with our landscaping, and one day she came over and, without bothering to check with us first on what needed to be done, assumed that the raspberries were weeds of some sort and cleared them all out, leaving the yard bereft of all vegetation except a sapling which I had been meaning to remove… We didn’t have the heart to tell her that we had actually wanted to keep a few of the raspberry plants.
Not that it mattered. Apparently she had missed some of the roots, and the next spring I was spared having to go out and buy more raspberry plants when they started sending up new canes. Before long we were inundated with raspberries again.
Ah, ivy. When we bought our 1973 vintage double-wide, the little old lady who lived here before (or the little old couple before her) planted the damned stuff around a support for the carport, the front of the house and the side. I am still, four years later, pulling up ivy, picking off leaves, and generally trying to eradicate it. I’ve given up on eradicating it; I’ve settled for pulling off every live leaf I can in order to just depress it a little.
This is a trailer, you know? Not some lovely, solid, gracious university. Something a bit, shall we say, flimsier? 'Twas no match for the ivy. The ivy was OPENING UP THE SIDING AND TRYING TO GET INSIDE.
It was beginning to succeed, too. Literally pulling off the siding as it grew. Scary stuff. I call it “Victorian Kudzu”.
Geez, you have my sympathies. I had to deal with an infestation of some mysterious vine we were never able to identify when we were selling our house (it looked like field bindweed…if it was King Kong’s field bindweed). I don’t think we could have ever managed if my little brother wasn’t so incredibly single-minded about killing it.
The good news in your case is that if using chemical treatments is an option for you, now is the perfect time of year to use Round-Up and similar herbicides.
Yeah, I’m normally dead set against chemicals, but I may have to make ONE (1) exception. Since I now have a rather large expanse of bare ground well away from anything we care about, I might carefully spray the bed with Roundup - just to try to get the ivy roots good and dead.
I also cut a bunch of (damn) shrub honeysuckle, (freaking) privet, and (shit-eating) Althea today. I’m going to paint the stumps with glyphosate.
I’m trying to establish a yard composed pretty exclusively of native plants of the Southeast. I’m a botanist by education, and I have a million ideas. I do not want a lawn. I want a patch of forest…complete with thick, rich forest soils, native shrubs, giant trees, and native wildflowers and ferns. We’ve planted Jacob’s Ladder, ladyfern, ebony spleenwort, ginger, Trillium, oak-leaf hydrangea (which is extra neat, because this county is the center of the natural distribution of that shrub), solomon’s seal, false solomon’s seal, phlox, rue anemone, foamflower, native azalea, Christmas fern, and about a hundred other things.
I’ve always avoided using herbicides, too, but in this case I could hardly blame you for breaking down and taking out the big guns. One method I’d heard of at a recent seminar I went to was putting on a heavy duty rubber glove, covering this with a cheap cloth glove, and then covering the cloth in Round-Up. Then, rub your gloved hand over every exposed bit of green on the ivy as it comes up. Obviously you’d want to be very, very careful about the gloving, but it reduces the amount of herbicide being let loose into the air and soil.
Remember, RoundUp is not a pre-emergent (meaning that it won’t kill roots underground without spraying the green leaves above) so you may have to spray several times to finally get the ivy to give up. The nice thing about RoundUp is that you can plant within 2 weeks of your last application.
I HATE that shit. I had a nasty infestation of it when I bought my house. Once I had it cleared out, it took a few years after that to get rid of it completely.
Roundup does not work well on English Ivy.
You need Ortho Bush-B-Gone. Mix it up at about 1.5 times the recommended concentration in a small spray bottle. There is a substance that you can buy that will make your mix a little stickier. (Edit: The stuff that I have is called Spray Mate.) Put in a few drops of that. This mixture is the only thing that will kill the Ivy. English Ivy leaves are waxy which is why you need the stuff to be sticky.
When a new leaf pops up, do not pull it out. Spray your mixture on the leaf and let it suck it down to the roots. After a few days, the leaf will dry up and turn brown. Then you can pull it. After two or three years, no more leaves will appear.
I don’t know if any of you have ever been around Portland, OR, but English Ivy is taking over the countryside there in classic invasive-species style. Concerned citizens and local college students have big ivy-pulling parties with little success. The stuff’s unkillable, which is why I’ve chosen it as an extremely mobile potted plant- excellent for my move-once-a-year lifestyle. Overwater it? Nothing happens. Don’t water it for a month? It couldn’t care less. Yank it off what it’s growing on? No problem.
Ivy seemed like such a good idea back in the suburb day in the 60’s/70’s for an evergreen shade groundcover. It does that job well. But, the main problem is, that when it climbs up trees and sets seed, birds eat the seed and take it off pooping into the woods, where it does the same neat trick of iron clad being, and outcompetes native plants. I have an amazing photo of an old abandoned house, had gone into the old living room, and the english ivy had come up the chimney, and on inside, all the way down to the fireplace, and was crawling all up the walls, inside. Cool photo, but nasty ass plant.
So, good on you for tearing it up, especially in Southern climes. In the large garden I work for, we tore it out, then laid unwaxed cardboard down for a season, with mulch on top. The cardboard deteriorates over a year, and smothers most of the ivy. That said, still, bits of ivy come up.
Two better alternatives are pachysandra-- not native, but doesn’t go off into the woods by seed, and a much better native alternative; Aster (Symphyotrichum–asters have been split-) divaricata(um). Very good shade groundcovers for the South.
We were ripping out our English ivy about 8 or so years ago, and the lady across the street asked if she could have some. We told her she was welcome to it but warned her how insidious it is and suggested that she try some nice docile pachysandra. She took the ivy anyway and planted it in front of her house, where it took over the entire front yard.
Now just last week she’s put the house up for sale. We’ll miss her. Hope the new neighbors nuke the lawn.
When we moved into our house, the entire backyard was taken over with Ailanthus trees. Why these are called Tree of Heaven, I do not know, because they are truly from the devil. They work in the same fashion as ivy…sending out runners with new trees popping up all along it. When you dig them up, you have to get every tiny piece of root…even the smallest piece will start shooting out new runners. And they grow FAST. OMG, we spent an entire summer digging up the root system, which was a huge network under pretty much the entire lot. Whenever we thought we were done, two days later, we would see little tiny trees popped up here & there. At least that helped us figure out where the roots were.
In my area, worse than English ivy is Virginia creeper. It’s faster, uglier, and looks oh so very much like poison ivy. Which I also have. The only difference betwixt the two is that the creeper has five leaf clusters instead of three. The creeper also doesn’t have hairy roots like the ivy, but I try not to get close enough to tell. I spend all my weed pulling time counting leaves and crossing my fingers.
This is my first full summer in my new yard, which has Virginia creeper, poison ivy, and English ivy (but no pointless periwinkle like the last house). I’m not a big fan of vines. The yard is so trashed from years of delinquent occupants that a flame thrower will probably be quicker, but I’m determined to do what I can little by little.
) and engulf my Mexican Palm.