Two things, there is a product called Ivy armor at any drugstore, that you can apply to your skin it's whenever you were going to be rethink you're going to be around poison ivy. The telephone lines when they came to our house and had to get through some to get to the phone linesman told me about the product. I will get poison ivy bad enough to need a steroid shots and I swell up like a character in Farside cartoons. One thing I need to note everyone thinks poison ivy spread and no it is not. What happens is that upon doing the laundry you can expose yourself to the oil to have gotten on your clothes or perhaps you set on something and transfer the oil from your clothing to the object you sat up on or you may have transfer the oil up toward your face and long arms etc. taking your shirt off things of that nature. I always have my family their clothing inside out so that when I put it in the laundry I did not get the poison ivy oil from their clothing. The fact is that what you have when you think the poison ivy has spread is in fact a latent outbreak from having come in contact with the oil sometime after your initial contact. Also, it cannot be spread from one person to another from the liquid in any of the blisters. Old Wives Tales!

I've never heard that before Alicia- i will have to try that with some of the things that are a pain to clean! Rosebush, it's going to be hard to get rid of it without using roundup, but i do wish you luck! Is there anyone in your family or friends who's not as sensitive that you could bribe to do the dirty work? If you have any touch me not, aka jewelweed, (impatiens pallida or biflora) growing, you can crush some stems in your hand and rub the juice over where you've touched it and that's supposed to help. Burt's bees even sells jewelweed soap for that purpose. I've read that anything that really messed with the skin's acidity, either way - either mild acids or alkali (like baking powder or vinegar) help to keep the urishiol oil from binding with your skin. I like the technu soap and have had great results using it through the years. When i do get the rash, Zanafel soap helps a lot- it has granules and supposedly can break the urishiol/skin bond after the rash is there. It certainly cuts down on the duration for me. It's very pricey, though, so i use it judiciously. It's not well known, but if you do get a bad rash, the docs can prescribe a couple creams that help clear it up fairly fast, too. Both fluocinonide (lidex) and triamoinolone work wonders. Lidex is stronger (a friend lent me some after a bad case) but when i asked the doc for my daughter who got a wicked case a few yrs back they said it was too strong and prescribed the triam stuff instead.

I wouldnt worry too much about it, wubba, unless the vine is hanging where you could accidentally touch it. If it is hanging over your side of the fence and within reach, consider lopping off the branch (preferably before it leaves out or in the fall after it has lost its leaves, to be safe.) If it is safely out of reach, its the berries youll have to fear more than the leaves, because youll be finding poison ivy seedlings about. That would be a legitimate reason to continue politely badgering your neighbor. But even if the vine is removed, you are still likely to see seedlings pop up from seeds that have been waiting in the dirt, or that have been carried into your yard by birds from elsewhere, via their flying poop-delivery service. Poison ivy is ubiquitous. The dried and fallen leaves shouldnt be so dangerous, so long as you handle them with a rake. Last fall I raked the poison sumac leaves into a heap under the sumac tree and left them there to rot, and got no rash in the process. Perhaps you could entice your neighbor to take care of the vine by suggesting better plants that could go in the same location. Maybe if you buy some sort of flowering vine for your yard and "accidentally" end up with an extra, and offer it to them? Or if you have a chainsaw, offer to stop by and sever the vine at the root? Killing it doesnt have to be a big production; maybe they just dont realize that. It may help, too, to just accept it as a part of the landscape. In some yards poison ivy is just something that has to be lived with. I expect to be removing it from the gardened portions of my yard until the end of time, but farther back in the wild bits, its going to remain a part of the landscape out of necessity. There is one particular old "mother vine" on the property that really is a joyful part of the landscape. All of the leaves are high up out of reach, the vine is a lovely gnarled thing to look at, and the birds love the berries. I could chainsaw this one, but Im sure the other local vines would still seed my yard, so I might as well keep this one around as an example of the native plants that I love. :) Yama do be careful. A person can develop a sensitivity to urishiol at any time during their life. And even though the oil doesnt bother you, if you get it on your clothes or tools or car-seat, and then someone else comes into contact with those surfaces, that person will be exposed.

I have not been able to grow the wild jewel weed which herbalists use for poison ivy in our Montana climate.I am not sure if it is growable in Colorado either since it is prefers the humidity of the eastern states and another likes the humidity on the western coast.. It is an impatien,, not sure if there any substitute for it in our drier climate or not..In the other hand my son who lives in Poison ivy land keeps a bottle of it from the local health food store just for the poison ivy..I would ask at a local nursery or call an herbalist they always know what grows around their areas..