Yaupon must die; all else is irrelevant

[nolarefugee]

How's the fight going?

 

[Big Barn]

I am at war.

I have a house on 50 acres of woodland in south Mississippi, and aside from my yard and driveway, I can't walk 30 feet without encountering yaupon holly -- sometimes a LOT of it. It's evergreen and produces attractive red berries in winter that birds love. I've read this feature makes it a desirable Christmas plant. If that's the case I want everybody to come to my house and take as much of the cr@p as they can cart away.

Yaupon holly is a native species, but lord amighty it's aggressive! It forms dense thickets and grows upwards of 20 feet tall, then pretty much the whole thicket starts bending over, taking with it whatever young trees happen to be unlucky enough to be competing with it in the same area. In presettlement times it was managed by wildfires. Now it's just gone berserk.

Foliar applications of glyphosate make it sick, but never completely kill it. I uproot as much as I can with my grapple, and I chainsaw the rest (pole saw, actually) and saturate the fresh stump with 41% glyphosate. I'm guaranteed to look like I've been in a fight with 57 cats at the end of a day battling the stuff; the limbs are tough and my skin is no match for it.

When I die, I'm pretty sure they'll find me in the woods where I fell, with a bent 20-footer in my cold hands, somewhere between a yaupon thicket and Yet Another brush pile.

At least I'll have died fighting. :thumbsup:

I am uncertain of the 41% designation, but I've had good results with full concentration glyphosphate applied with an empty dish detergent squeeze bottle. Just a couple of drops into the freshly cut stumps as you have already tried.

No experience with Yaupon Holly, but it works well on Black Bamboo.

Terry

 

[Rustyiron]

This may be waayy in left field, but I killed some stuff with a heavy dose of road salt on the ground around the "target". Pretty much poisoned the ground with salt, that can't have any real negative enviromental impact (I think)
I don't imagine that road salt is widely available in ole' Miss:laughing: (try water softener salt)