Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire My war on poison ivy

I've never gone on the offensive against poison ivy before. I just learned to avoid it.

But that's changed. I bought 4 gallons of 43% glyphosate,.. been mixing it 18 ounces to 2 gallons of water,..and every couple of days for the past week or so I take my 2 gallon sprayer and go in search of it.

I saw how much of that stuff was growing on my 5 acre patch last year and I just thought there was too much of it to tackle. But this year, I've decided to make it a routine to go on search and destroy missions to rid my place of it.

It's difficult to get to some of it because it grows in the shade of brush,..so I've got to climb up inside the grown up areas of my place to get to it.

I've made about 4 swoops of the place so far and today I noticed that it's getting hard to find any that isn't in the process of dying from my previous applications of weed killer.

I know I'll never be able to completely eradicate it. But I'm going to appreciably thin it out.

It helps that I'm able to spot it so well. I got wrecked a couple of times by poison ivy when I was a kid and I learned to spot it at an early age. One sprig of poison ivy can be growing in a patch of Virginia creeper and I can lock onto it.

Come down here and get all that schit around my stomping grounds when you’re done if you find yourself bored. I hate that stuff with a passion, have already had two bad cases of it this year from hunting turkeys and arrowheads.

I know how that can be. You've got to learn to spot it. As mentioned, it made a mess of me a couple of times when I was a kid and I learned to pick it out from everything growing around it.

I hate that when turkey hunting. Seems like it is all over the place.

every spring when the grass is come in but its not to hot, i put on long pants, long sleeve shirt, gloves and a hat and go around ripping that stuff up

it still comes back, over time I've learned to aim the weed eater away from when I hit it, then when I finish i come inside and scrub my face and neck.

hate that stuff

Had a bunch of poison oak growing out of an hollow old growth stump on my old place. Waited till winter in a rain storm when I was sure everyone was inside and threw a bunch of firewood down the hole, lit er up, and threw some drywall over the top. Cooked that schit alive and never came back. Made me smile.

There is no question about it, you can eliminate it, you just have to keep at it. When you think you have it all take a break for a couple of weeks and go looking for it again.

I have faith Brother.

Get a 2 gallon spray bottle and some glyphosate concentrate. It kills it at the roots. It'll kill everything else it touches, however. So you need to concentrate on only putting it where you want it to go.

Sumac is the worst.

You can avoid killing everything in an area when killing poison oak if you make a hockey stick shaped pvc applicator. The top end of the stick has a screw plug, the bottom of the stick has some small holes drilled in it and a car wash mitt zip tied around it. Roundup drips outa the stick into the mitt, wipe it across the tops of the leaves and you won't kill nothin you don't want to.

I'm not sure what variety we have up here but a little Outlaw wilts it down fast.

I believe Outlaw is a version of Banvel?

stuff eats me alive! I've become a expert at spotting it

Glyphosate does a good job. But it takes a couple of days to see that it's working. That premixed poison ivy killer is glyphosate mixed with some type of defoliant and it will pucker it up overnight. But good old glyphosate will take it out all by itself. The results are just not as immediate.

Didn’t have great luck with glyphosate here since poison ivy is a woody plant. Brush killer does the trick though. Had a big patch that hit the dust when I borrowed a tractor with a squirrel cage blower on the back, covered 50-60 ft at a swath

When I was a kid I had it all over my body at different times. Now 63 years old, I can roll in and have no problems. Go figure.

Get some Hyvar XL

It won't come back for a year or more. If ever.

Special note* you won't be able plant termator plants anywhere near there for a couple years.

This has been an extremely bad year for poison ivy in my neck of the woods. Like you, I spotted it early and did weekly search and destroy missions also. I've got it wiped out. Of course, I'm not dealing with 5 acres but me and the Round Up laid it low.

RS

I'm in a similar battle with wild parsnip. It spreads like wild fire and in the last 5 years its taken over every ditch and CRP field in Iowa. I have som nice CRP planted in native wild flowers and grasses that I'm trying to save. I'm also getting Canadian thistles and common mullins as well.. i put a 15 gallon sprayer on my ATV and spray from it. I use some pasture spray I get at Tractor Supply .

kwg

If you have good fences, goats love the stuff and they're immune to it. They'll clean it right up. Just don't pet them after they've been wallowing in it.

Keep at it, eventually you’ll get the majority of it.