I don't have a lot of plants so hand picking them for now seems to be working. I take my soon to be 6 year old daughter out with me, I search and she destroys. She gets a kick out of it and it gives her something to do and she is learning about bad bugs already! It really seems to have slowed the invasion down!

Nearly impossible to kill. They have a massive root system. Search for bindweed to find various threads talking about methods (usually involves round up painting on the leaves or stuffing entire wads of vines into cans of round up and leaving it all summer). I'm pretty sure the bindeweed in our yard is part of a root system that covers the entire city block.

Kathy, I have air potato vines growing in my yard and they are a strange vine, the leaves are very glossy and heart shaped and the vine is one of the strongest I have ever seen. You said your friend has little taders? My taders get huge! I am talking the size of a tennis ball! Yes there are small ones also I imagine they would get bigger if the season allowed. They seem to start forming on the vine around the end of Sept. and grow pretty fast until the first frost here. Michelle mentioned they are very invasive in Florida.... Yes, they are! I am in South Carolina and they are here also. I keep mine under controll or at least try to. I have some in hanging baskets around my patio and they have grown upwards onto the roof of the structure which I really like,and a couple are growing around some small ornamental plum trees that I have, I just let them grow around the trunk, I have to keep the vine from going into the branches because it will take over the small trees in no time. Last year after the taders formed I just picked them off and saved them until this spring. I kept them in a drawer where I keep my seeds and they had all sprouted and the vine was growing out of the drawer and starting to get leaves. AMAZING! Those are the ones that I put into the hanging baskets and they grew like wild fire. You must control them! Every now and again I will find one that has popped up in the yard and I don't have a clue how it got there. I just pull it out and keep an eye on that spot making sure not to let it come back. Check the ground around where you have them planted because I always find them laying around they will grow where ever they fall. I hope this helps you a bit...I do tend to ramble on sometimes. Treesa207

It looks like a morning glory, and if I'm wrong on the id, then my second and third guesses are bindweed or mile-a-minute vine. To me, the name didn't matter so much as getting a handle on it. 2 years ago, this was not present on my property. Last year, around June, I started seeing it for the first time ever, and it QUICKLY (2 weeks) smothered a 15' pear tree and did its best to run whereever it could. It was easy to tear out of the tree(s), but the thin stems make it hard to get a good hold of when trying to uproot, and usually breaks off at ground level, which will only make it resprout in a few days. Thankfully, I've found it easy to control with roundup, which pretty much stops it in its tracks. If its climbing into a nice shrub or tree, I'll just squirt the ground-level leaves of this vine to keep the spray away from any foliage of the host. It quickly dies back and the stuff tangled in the trees withers to dust shortly. This year its only been spotted in a few spots, and I've been quick on the control efforts. It never flowered, and certainly never went to seed last year, so I'm not sure where its coming from, other than perhaps little bits of root left over from last year when I first started to yank it. FWIW, I think it only likes sunny spots, as it doesn't seem to be in any of my shade canopies. (we'll leave those areas to the creeper, PI, nightshade and bittersweet)