And you thought the War of Independance was over? We were just resting up, and have now sent our vegetative advance forces to soften you up!
That sounds amazing and beautiful, and friendly to butterflies, bugs, bees and birds! I wish I could do something like that, but we own the place and rent the lot and have to follow park rules about upkeep and appearance.
There are places in Victoria where I’ve seen a whole hillside that was nothing but Ivy from the house down to the beach at Cadboro Bay.
Two or three years… <<runs off sobbing>>
I don’t want to use anything toxic on it, as one of the big thick trunks of it is planted right by a dark red rose that I particularly like. So I just pull it, year after year after year.
I have some nice golden bamboo in a pot… it’s getting big… think I should put it in the ground now? (Joking!)
Oh, but I like Virginia creeper. I think it’s pretty. It grows on my fence and up into one tree, and dies back every year. In the fall, it gives me just the tiniest bit of fall color as the leaves turn red and die…
“Plant lantanas,” said my aunt, “they’re really easy to grow, you hardly have to care for them at all!”
And how. The first year, the little six-pack we planted utterly took over their portion of the garden. They were choking out other flowers and blocking their access to water, such that we had to move sprinklers around to keep everything alive. What’s really crazy is, not only did it grow, the stuff got woody, to an extent that still amazes me. Pulling those suckers up was like removing a tree. On top of that, the damn stuff has spines everywhere, so you can’t even cut it back without gloves. And when you do trim it back, you fill up two or three huge garbage sacks, and it looks like you haven’t done anything at all.
And you know, they’re not unattractive, but lordy, do they smell like weeds. And the spines make them wholly unapproachable.
We’ve got quite a bit of English ivy along one side of our house. Our neighbor has a ton of it, so we’dnever be able to eradicate it. It doesn’t bother me all that much - every spring I just have to be ruthless in pulling it up and cutting it back. Then again later in the fall when it tries to invade the house. But as long as we are sufficiently aggressive, we’ve been able to keep it pretty well confined to a designated area.
Far worse - IMO - is buckthorn. When we moved in 12 years ago, our neighbors on all 3 sides of our backyard intentionally cultivated the damn things! Now we are down to one buckthorn in my one idiot neighbor’s yard. And thanks to that one damn tree, I have to pretty much dedicate 2 days a year to sitting in the dirt behind my bushes, pulling up millions of seedlings…
Just get a spray bottle. You can direct the spray so that the mixture only gets on the ivy leaves.
Better yet, use a chunk of cardboard to shield the rose while you spray. Or spray your herbicide on a paint brush and paint it on what you want to die.
I planted mint last spring in my herb garden.
I think I made a big mistake.
Yes, yes you did.
Round-Up is non-toxic for humans.
Good luck with your ivy battle. I am fighting the Star of Bethlehem battle aka Sleepydick (love the name). nice flower but a pest
It LOOKS like crocus leaves and it is a bulb, but it is Satan’s bulb. If you don’t get it all, it grows back double (I swear). I have been digging it up this spring (once the ground dries up in summer, you cannot get these damned things out of the ground). I am also getting a flame-thrower for Mother’s Day (I’m so excited!).
flamethrower for a soccer mom
I had ivy for several years as well. I think it is all gone now, but I am ever vigilant. I cannot wait to [del]fry the shit out of [/del] control the creeping charlie that is strangling some of my garden beds.
BLESS YOU. These goddamn things (sleepydick) are making our lives a living hell. We had a few last year. I didn’t recognize it, but it was pretty, so we decided to leave it.
This year, we had at least ten thousand of the goddamn things. I’ve spent hours every weekend carefully extracting the evil little bastards from the ground.
Now I have a name to put on it. Talk about an insidious bulb. The rootlets actually all form minibulbs, and it spreads like the pox. We’ve been calling it Satanflower.
Now that I know it’s an exotic, I have an excuse to kill every one I see.
I see you fell for the same thing I did. The first year we were in this house (21 years ago), they came up and I thought–oh, pretty! Bet they’re crocuses! No blooms, so I figured I’d wait a year. The next year, there were more… ominously more, but the lil white flowers were just so loverly. The next year-- it hit me. Get thee behind me, sleepydick!
I’ve been fighting it ever since (that’s 18 years my friend). I did a whole HUGE patch of it with round-up, (use it liberally darling and make it more concentrated than the package suggests for this hellborn bulb), covered with THICK cardboard and then mulch. It worked like a charm, but this year–they’re back in that area and they’re ready to rumble.
I find it easiest to use a small spade right now and dig out the clumps. The stray ones are the hardest to get out–but they are bastard seeds of doom. Do NOT compost these suckers–you will only give them a nice warm waterbed to copulate and procreate to their whorish content.
I cannot wait for the flamethrower. Even if it doesn’t kill the roots, I will derive much satisfaction from frying the lil fuckers. <laughs maniacally>
I try to avoid pesticides as much as I can, but I make an exception for Satanflower (nice name, btw). I spray and chortle as I do so…
You all can make tea with shorts! I live on a freakin’ alkali drylake and can’t get anything to grow!
I gotta pick my nose if I wanna see anything green around here!
Hey, fly me down to where ever you live. I’ll take care of it. 
One look from me, and any type of ivy (except grape ivy) curls up and dies on the spot. It’s one of only a few houseplants that don’t grow and thrive under my care.
Pressure-washing perhaps, although whenever I’ve pressure washed it’s just been with water and only for intense cleaning of floors.
So, how about kudzu? That sure was everywhere in the Carolinas.
My wife and I did this a few years ago, and I’m here to tell you that you can achieve your goals.[/inspirational] Our ivy problem was up to inch-and-a-half thick vines that were choking a few trees to death, as well as swallowing a whole rock wall we didn’t even know existed. The trees ended up as collateral damage. We were digging and chopping and bagging for many weekends (our biggest weekend was 40 bags of ivy, if I recall correctly), and we were fully expecting to have to keep at it for years to come, but we were lucky: we’ve only had a handful of tiny sprouts in the few years since. I think one thing I did that really paid off was to doggedly follow every root as deep as humanly possible. I basically turned over the entire patch of earth about two feet deep, sifting for roots that I missed that might still be viable. The other trick is to keep reminding yourself that being beaten by a plant is unacceptable.
Amen. Now when we’re out for a walk and see a house with ivy – no matter how apparently-contained or well-kept – we just nod and say “looks like they’ve got an ivy problem.”
Our new foe is BlueBells, which are trickier. They go guerilla, sprouting in the weirdest places and spreading from there, and when you dig them up, if you miss the tiniest bulb, you’re screwed. I actually now have fantasies of removing every last cubic inch of dirt from our side yard bed, sifting it, and putting it back. It may come to that.
The only ivy problem I’ve ever had to deal with was a particularly aggressive poison ivy vine that spanned the entire length of our backyard (not a small distance - we had an acre and a half square lot at the time), and the trunk vine was THICK. Had to tear up the entire back section of the yard by the rock wall to get it all.
Oh Jeebus. You just described how English Ivy killed my weekend.
I’ve found the best way to get rid of this stuff is to follow the procedure below:
- Obtain a Bobcat or other earth-moving machine with a 4-in-1 bucket.
- Open the bucket and position it at the far end of the ivy bed, so that the blade scrapes along the ground.
- Back up, taking with you all of the ivy and the first six inches of soil or so.
- Lather, rinse, repeat
Last season, I made the mistake of dumping a lot of soil/ivy mixture over my back fence. The stuff took root in the topsoil I scraped off and grew back into my beds by traveling under the fence. So guess what I did this weekend?
I also removed some unsightly bushes, so the weekend wasn’t a total loss. But I feel your pain. Getting rid of this stuff is no fun.
Man, did I speak too soon.
I get home from work yesterday evening and my wife says “The landscapers are coming to mulch tomorrow, and there’s some ivy, vinca, and euonymous that needs to be pulled from the front gardens.”
Vile weed!
I was fore-warned, so my mint is in a pot in my screened patio. I have as much as I want, and no more. Same with catnip. I figured since it’s in the mint family as well, that I’d best keep it pot-bound, too.