The challenge of Kudzu

[2manyrocks]

I have about a 1/2 acre of Kudzu on a very steep open slope at my property. Where it squeezes out of this slope onto usable land I spray it with generic glyphosphate. It seems to knock it back for a couple of years. One of these days I will tackle the entire area. I would love to fence the entire thing in and run goats on it, I honestly think that might be the only way to do it.

My experience with glyphosphate is it would brown the leaves, but the kudzu kept coming back. I recently switched to a combination of aminopyralid (Milestone, Chaparral, and OpenSight) + tricclopry (Brushtox) and surfactant. The kudzu that I have sprayed with this combination doesn't seem to recover as easily as it did when I used gly.

I have tried using a pair of goats in the past. They also did an effective job on the kudzu. The problem was the work required to put up a good fence (wood posts and T posts with multiple strands of electric fence wire) to keep them in and to keep predators out.

Since then, I see that some people are now using mesh polywire electric netting that comes preassembled with posts, while others are using a stranded polywire system made by Gallager, also with posts. Essentially, the fence is unrolled, the posts are stuck in the ground, and the goats are contained in that area until it's time to rotate them elsewhere. Time and energy are saved because the entire fence rolls out and sets up at once. These fences eliminate driving T posts and walking back and forth to put individual strands of wire in place.

You might want to look into these new fence systems, especially if you have a slope where it's difficult to walk, much less install traditional fencing.

 

[Fuddyduddy1952]

Our neighbors have lots of goats. I'd borrow some!