[ Lost in the Landscape ]

scorched earth gardening

After my last post I did more research on con­trol­ling Eng­lish ivy. Beyond the commonly-quoted advice to spray with her­bi­cides, or to attempt the mechan­i­cal removal that is occu­py­ing me these days, I saw an inter­est­ing idea for a new but as-yet-untested bio­log­i­cal con­trol Noth­ing imme­di­ately use­ful, unfor­tu­nately. And then I started to see tech­niques that could only be dreamed up by peo­ple like me who’ve been spend­ing too much time fight­ing off Hed­era helix.

From the folks at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, in a dis­cus­sion of ivy, comes:

Pre­scribed burn­ing: An extreme method that has been used with some suc­cess is to burn ivy plants and resprouts with a blow torch at reg­u­lar inter­vals; the energy used by the plant to regrow will even­tu­ally be depleted. Obvi­ously, this approach requires con­sid­er­able caution.

And from Organic Land Care.com comes:

Another more dras­tic method has been to use a blow-torch to repeat­edly blast the plant with a hot flame. By repeat­edly expos­ing the plant to high heat, this method is intended to exhaust the H. helix of its energy so that it is unable to mul­ti­ply or pro­duce berries for repro­duc­tion (Reichard, 2000).

So…fatigued of doing things the old-fashioned way, I went to the garage and got the blow­torch. After aim­ing the flame at some ivy leaves they began to writhe and smoke in a most sat­is­fy­ing way. Soon the leaves started to burn, which sur­prised me since ivy is one of the plants that shows up occa­sion­ally as a rec­om­mended plant for firescap­ing. As the leaves burned, some of the dead grasses around them started to catch fire. Just a lit­tle more heat and I’d have had a lit­tle brush­fire started. Hmmmm. Maybe it’s not such a good idea, I started to think, look­ing up at a wood fence not more than two feet away. Damn, it felt good, but I ended the exper­i­ment right then and there–it prob­a­bly wasn’t a good idea to burn down the neighborhood!

March 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: blowtoches • ivy • prescribed burning • weeding • weeds | 1 Comment »

vegetable plutonium

In my more active anti-nuke activist days one of the more com­pelling argu­ments against nuclear power was that some of its byprod­ucts were so long-lived that they would remain lethal for longer than human civ­i­liza­tion has existed. Plutonium-239, for exam­ple, has a half-life of some­thing like 24,000 years, and even a tiny par­ti­cle of it could prove dan­ger­ous to a person.

I was think­ing about that dur­ing my weed­ing exer­cise this week­end, deal­ing with a neglected cor­ner of the gar­den where the neighbor’s Eng­lish ivy had crossed over and under the fence and set up a stand that had spread 20 feet or more into my yard. In the course of its inva­sion, it had con­tributed to a low brick retain­ing wall being pushed over.

The wall the ivy helped push over

I hate to use stuff like Roundup in the yard, but I tried it on the ivy a cou­ple weeks ago. Some of the weeds around it shriv­eled to brown ghosts of them­selves, but at best the ivy showed a lit­tle burn­ing around the edges of the leaves. I’d tried Roundup­ping the ivy before, with sim­i­lar min­i­mal results. Ivy really seems like the thing that wouldn’t die. Some online sites have guide­lines on how to get rid of the stuff, but none of them seem to guar­an­tee easy con­trol. (A cou­ple of the sites I looked at: South­east Exotic Pest Plant Coun­cil Inva­sive Plant Man­ual and the Plant Con­ser­va­tion Alliance’s “Least wanted” pages.)

I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to the alter­na­tive of dig­ging it out by hand, but dig­ging it out by hand was the chore that ate my week­end. And it’s a chore that’ll be occu­py­ing at least a cou­ple more. The job is extra-awful in that even a lit­tle piece of ivy run­ner left in the ground could grow roots and set up a whole new colony. You have to be sure to dig down the foot or so that the run­ners can travel at, and you need to be sure that you’ve rid the patch of all the alien ivy life forms before you move on to the next spade­full. It’s like veg­etable plu­to­nium in that any lit­tle bit left in the ground could prove dan­ger­ous for future gen­er­a­tions. Nasty, evil stuff.

Here you can see the pro­por­tion of dirt to ivy roots…

If my mantra of my teen years was “No nukes!” the mantra of my cur­rent gar­den­ing life has to be “No Ivy!” Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for his quote that went some­thing like, “Doctor’s can always bury their mis­takes. Archi­tects can only plant ivy.” Well, friends, doing that would be the great­est mis­take of all.

March 03 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • quotes | Tags: herbicides • ivy • plutonium • weeding • weeds | 2 Comments »