Subject: RE:Control of Posion Ivy
From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 1994 21:15:40 UTC
Newsgroups: bionet.plants

In Article <[email-masked]> "[email-masked] 
(Christopher Kashinath Patil)" says:
> A friend of mine owns some beautiful land in Virginia which happens to be
> totally overrun with poison ivy. It is a wooded, hilly area with lots of
> deciduous trees (I'm not a botanist and don't know what kind); the underbrush
> seems to be primarily poison ivy. 
> 
> She'd like to make the land more livable by getting rid of the poison ivy,
> and would ideally like to do so by introducing a competitor plant that isn't
> as noxious but which could occupy the same niche as the ivy. If this plant
> were more fertile than the ivy, over a period of years it might be able to
> gradually replace the ivy with minimum ecological disruption.
> 
> Does this sound reasonable? If so, which plants would be good candidates?
> 

I have had the same problems in Iowa and have found only two solutions --
spot spraying with herbicide and controlled burning the area.  Of the two
burning seems to work the best.
 
Low intensity groundfires seem to be historically common in many woodland
communities in the US.  Their exclusion by European settlement has allowed
the introduction of many brushy species rarely seen in the virgin forests.  
Posion ivy seems to be one.  Returning the fire to the forest restores the
original control.  I don't know if such fires occurred in your area  -- but
they did in many areas that never would seem to allow them.  They were set
by Native Americans during dry weather in late fall or early winter to open
the woods for easier travel and hunting.  This fire time is still called 
Indian Summer.
 
Controlled burning requires some expertise and training to perform safely,
but is required only every few years, and results in a much more open and
friendly (to humans) environment.  

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