kudzu

[limbrat]

I found some on my place. Can i wick it monthly with a good herbicide to keep it down?

[wmrussel]

Come late October, you shouldn't have to worry about until next spring.  You'll need to spray it good more than once to kill it.  I'd talk to a local forester about controlling, if it needs it.

[WDH]

Check out this article. http://www.bugwood.org/crp/kudzu.html   The key is whether there are any other plants in with the kudzu that you want to protect.  If so, then that complicates things significantly.  Traditionally, Tordon (picloram) has been used to control kudzu in several applications over several years.  The issue is that Tordon kills the kudzu over several years, but it kills everything else too  .  It looks like you have some options with other herbicides.

[limbrat]

Thanks  there are some native herbs, grass, bamboo as well as some young sparkel berry and big leaf magnolia that i would like to keep. What i did was to take a old shoe polish dobber that the wife uses to keep her shoes white. I use it in the garden with a 50% mix of the generic round up on weeds just wipe the stalk and it dead. I wiped every piece of kudzu i could find on and off my property.
Acouple of hills over a land owner has spent a lot of money tring to get if off his land but he started late after it killed a couple of aces of young pines.

[customsawyer]

If you are wanting to save some grass and berries inside the kudzu then I would recommend Transline (sp) I have not used it for a few years so be sure and check the label for the things you are wanting to save. If you can run a fire through the area after you spray as it will burn up the seeds that are produced and make for a lot less to spray next year. Escort will work on it also but it will kill grasses and berries. Like WDH said your best kill will come from tordon.

[Al_Smith]

Oh my if they'd have only known how much of a nuisance this stuff is they'd have never even left it in the country .It was a bright idea they got from the worlds fair of 1876 from Japan .Great idea for errosion  or so they thought .

Other great ideas have worked just about as well ,like english ivy which cracks the morter joints of masonary building and engulfs every thing in sight .

I wonder what would happen if a herd of hungry goats were strategically launched as a counter attack on this stuff .Probably just a bunch of fat lazy goats in the end that in addition to eating the stuff fertilized the ground in doing so causing the stuff to become even more hearty .Before too long you couldn't even find the goats any more .

[customsawyer]

Goats do fairly well on the Kudzu but they tend to eat the leaves that you need to put the chemical on. If goats are your only source to get rid of the Kudzu then it is still a good idea to run a fire through in the winter to burn the seeds. Keep in mind that if you start digging in a Kudzu patch with a back-hoe or something there is as many roots under the ground as there is vines on top. Thus the need for chemical to kill it.

[Al_Smith]

You folks down south are blessed with this nasty stuff .We more northly were inandated for years with multiflora rose .

On that stuff a goat wasn't much use ,it took a dozer and fire to get rid of that stuff .

They thought originally it would make a nice "living  fence " which it did .However that 10 foot wide fence row soon became 20 then 30 then took over the whole field .Plus the birds would eat the seeds from the rose hips and plant it hither and yawn where ever their flight path was  by aerial bombardment  so to speak .

[customsawyer]

The Kudzu gets spread a lot by equipment around here. Someone will go on to a tract to plow fire breaks or some such task and have to go through some kudzu. Then when they move to another tract there might be some seeds on the plow that gets dropped onto the next land owner. One of the worst things I see is when a road grader on a county dirt road is digging the ditch next to a patch of kudzu and they just drag it all the way down the road.