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	Poison Ivy Your best defense against a potential threat creeping around your landscape.
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Transcript: Poison Ivy

Today I want to talk to you about poison ivy, a noxious weed we have to deal with many times in our landscape. It's planted by birds. They feed on the seed and then go land along a power line or fence line, even a tree, and with one quick flick of the tail, it's planted and fertilized.

Poison ivy is easy to identify. You can go by the old adage: leaves of three, let it be. Another characteristic is sometimes the leaves have a little thumb on the bottom end of the two lower leaves, kind of like a mitten, if you will. But leaf form varies a lot, even on the same plant, so don't just memorize one particular form, but get an overall idea.

It's easy to deal with in terms of control. If it's growing up a trunk like this, you can simply cut off the vine somewhere at the bottom. It attaches to the trunk with these hair-like, root-like growths, and it you cut it off, everything above that dies. Then on the lower spouts that come up, go ahead and spray or treat those.

You can dig up poison ivy to discard it; that works quite well. You want to be sure and where gloves and be careful. Don't burn it after you dig it up because the burning process will produce a smoke that will get into your lungs and do major damage, so be real careful with it.

In addition to digging it up, the next option would be to spray it for control. There are a number of products that are on the market that are effective. They have names like brush killer or poison ivy killer. And you can even use the common pesticide glycoside which is found in Roundup and other products to control it.

Spray late in the year, late summer to early fall, because that's the time of year when it will move down into the plant and you'll get the most complete kill.

With your common sense tip with more information than you probably care to know about poison ivy, I'm Skip Richter.

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