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Re: Poison Ivy

Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html

My favorite broad-spectrum organic herbicide is boiling water.  Be very
careful, though; it's a lot more dangerous than Roundup, although it
becomes harmless much more quickly once it gets on the ground.  It's
also pretty cheap.

I use a teakettle.  Last year, when I was fighting the poison ivy, I
used a two-gallon pot, which was probably a bad idea --- hard to
control, slow to heat up, and likely to slosh.

Boiling water also kills seeds, which Roundup doesn't, if I remember
correctly.  This can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on
what seeds are present where you're pouring it.

I recently got two very nasty plants in my lawn; dark green things with
white spines all over them, more painful to the merest touch than any
cactus, although the pain is more fleeting.  They rather resemble
thistles or dandelions, but they don't grow upward --- they hug the
ground and crowd out the grass, even more than dandelions do.  

(Are these nettles?  They seem to be very popular on my block this
year, and I've never seen one before.)

A pint or so of boiling water on each one (I found them on different
days), which took about a minute to slowly pour on, immediately turned
them into steamed vegetables, no longer painful to the touch.  The
smaller one has about a four-inch-radius circle of dead grass around it
now; the grass around the larger one hasn't died yet.

Several days later, I keep looking at them every day --- I'm afraid the
accursed things will spring back up.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08.  Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>
The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either.  :)


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