Eeek! Sorry I don’t have any help or suggestions...just sending my sympathies!!

Appreciate your response, GardenHo, even if you couldn't give me advice! le sigh...

When you have time read this thread.

https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/2039081/100000-buckthorns-to-kill#n=644

I have adapted it to kill privet, tree of heaven, princess tree, eunoymus, hackberry, poison ivy, trumpet vine, and etc. You use full strength weed and brush killer and paint it on the stump. For the vines, you can cut and stick the vine down in the bottle. (Protect from pets.)

Although you are using Round up, you are not spraying it everywhere. It just goes down to the roots.

ETA: You want to cut and paint right away. If the stump or vine has time to close over, it won't work.

Theyre popping up in my yard too. I assume the birds are carrying them in because they are mostly under a large tree and I dont see any mature vines nearby. I just keep pulling and mowing them.

Another sympathizer here. My neighbor planted trumpet vine to grow up a light pole - it's everywhere now, even growing in the ditch along the road up the embankment. Her husband gets the weedeater out and tries to control it that way.

But I wouldn't have any idea how to remove something like that or bittersweet vines from a lawn. Does the bittersweet travel by root or seed?

It travels by both, schoolhouse -- seed by the birds (and other critters?) and once they grow, the roots go wherever they wish, all over the place. It's hard for me to pull them, as at 73 and vertically-challenged I have not as much strength as I used to have. The baby ones I can manage, but likely do not get the entire root, which means the blasted thug just renews itself merrily. grrrrr.

tigereye -- Thanks so much for the suggestion of cutting and applying herbicide to the stump - carefully! I am planning to do this, tho I admit to being quite leery of the use of poisons. And I would prefer to have the present weather here in Central Massachusetts moderate a bit before I do. Must grit my teeth, and dress appropriately! Now to go and read your link...

I send my sympathies too. I've had a way out of control trumpet vine and I know your pain! Birds didn't give it to me. I did it to myself!

Thank dandy_line. Buy a cheap paint brush and store it in a zip lock. I buy the brush killer that says it is OK after 30 minutes, but I like to try to give it several hours before rain. There are a few that are going to need a second treatment, but not many. This way the poison is only going down to the roots and it does not kill anything in the bed around it. The root is still there, but that hasn't been a problem yet. I just plant around it.

ETA: Somewhere on here I read a thread that said roots could meld and then you would kill both plants. I haven't found that to be a problem.

Jay -- LOL! I know what you mean, as I deliberately planted goosenecked loosestrife here 20 years ago, pretty but also thuggish, tho easier to pull out where not wanted.

Reminds me of a true story in my distant past: DH was a career officer in the USAF. We had the chance to be stationed back in the early 70s near my parents, and as a welcome gift, my mother brought a vase with a lovely spray of bittersweet for my new residence (which my father also owned). When my dad saw that, he went ballistic, as he knew it could become a problem on the property; we quickly put it in a trash bag for removal and that was that. =)

You can also put some in a mustard type bottle and just drip it on cut portion. Less messy and more precise application. I did this with poison ivy....worked great!

Kudos to Ken for this idea!!!

tigereye, thanks again for further info! Sounds as if I shall be doing this quite soon. Now where did I put those sponge brushes,,,

Wish plants I do want would grow as vigorously, darn it!

“Wish plants I do want would grow as vigorously, darn it!”

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Be careful and good luck!

I have a neighbor who completely ignores their yard except for one mowing about once a month in the growing season and that's basically it. They have a chain link fence with bittersweet vines growing on it, which just get bigger and bigger every year. They have a wild grape vine that has traveled about 30 ft into a Spruce that is now covering half of the tree. *sigh*. So you can imagine how many bittersweet vines pop up in my yard, that birds have evidently deposited. And before I realized it was a problem, they had grown very large in the middle of my mature Itea shrub in front of my house. I was really worried about it, especially since I am an organic grower and don't use pesticides or herbicides. So resorted to simply cutting them back every spring. And that seems to be keeping them under control. I do see some new growth just about every spring, but I cut it back to the ground and do it again the next spring. My Itea shrub is none the worse for it. And we have learned to recognize a very small bittersweet vine when we see it and pull them out at every opportunity. We seem to be doing fine with that approach.

Yep. It hasn't rained lately and everything is wilted, turning brown, or just not looking good. The weeds on the other hand are dark green 5 or 6 foot tall, and very robust!

At one point I stuck the whole end of a trumpet vine right in to the poison. it wasn't the big bottle but I decanted some into a smaller bottle and stuck the vine in. That worked very well for a whole section of trumpet vines. Then I just had to watch them in each section for babies. It took a long long time but I kept at it. You have my sympathies.

Prairiemoon, I'm impressed that the bittersweet vine only needs to be cut once a season. Does it still flower if you only cut it once?

I am 90% organic, but I do selectively bring out the chemicals for the following: goutweed (good grief) which I can't pull out with my hands, weeds that grow in high-traffic areas, which means I can't pull them out by the roots, and problem weeds that grow up in the middle of the roots of a desirable plant.

Ken always send the spring warning about not walking on soil. He's so right. It's so much easier to pull an entire weed root, even dandelion, when the soil is light and fluffy. I must say that all the rain we've had has made the weeds so easy to pull. Very little chemicals needed this year!

Deanna, the only one in my yard that I have not been able to dig out and get rid of is the one that is growing in the middle of my Itea shrub. And that has never flowered. It gets big enough to show itself above the foliage of the Itea and that's when I get out the loppers and take care of it before it blooms.

I'm thankful that I haven't found myself frustrated enough to have to resort to chemicals. I've never grown any other way for 40 years and organic growing is deeply imbedded for me. I have one weed in the yard that my usual choices hasn't eliminated, but again, I stay on top of it and we co-exist. I had a large patch of a horrid weed, I forget the name of it, but it was a grass. It was in my original vegetable garden and I was very inexperienced at the time and I did the absolute worst thing and took the tiller to the garden and all that did was multiply all the weeds 10 fold. I was so frustrated, I gave up on my vegetable garden for 2 years. I didn't have time to deal with it and I was out of ideas. Then I was reading about soil solarization and we had a leftover 3ml plastic roll from a skating ring in the garage, so I laid that over the entire vegetable bed 25x25 ft and left it there for a year, weighted down with bricks. That took care of it. I haven't seen that weed since.

I have one burning bush in my yard and ever since realizing that it is an invasive, I've wanted to get rid of it, but, I've read so many stories about how they keep coming back and how deep the roots go and I just keep ignoring it. I know I could probably cut it to the ground and apply chemicals, but I just haven't brought myself to do it. I've cut it back to the ground a couple of times, but it grows back. My other alternative is some equipment that could dig it out and make pretty quick work of it. One of these days... [g]

Persistent, systematic chlorophyl denial is a good way to do these plants in.

I first became familiar with bindweed when I volunteered at a newly started food pantry garden. It was rampant throughout the grounds and had survived very well the tilling of the soil to clean out the weeds and set up the fields. I became by default the bindweed remover and by definition had to use organic methods. It is now almost gone from the main beds, and I am now working on side areas. Here is what I know:

These plants with diabolical roots systems all need to feed themselves by leafing out. The secret is to disrupt this process (chlorophyl denial). If you have 10 or 15 minutes a week to devote to this process you will be quite effective (much more useful than a one time massive clean up effort or efforts widely separated in time). I selected a spot in the garden and at the end of my first session, I had a kill zone. No bindweed was allowed to come up in this zone. It was immediately yanked no matter how small it was. No food for the roots. The original territory could be covered more quickly each week because the bindweed was thinning out. So I systematically expanded my zone of chlorophyl denial. I learned to ignore the bindweed romping through adjacent spaces because I knew I would be killing it off in a while when I reached that point. I would have done something if it started to flower and set seed. Every week, I start my inspection in the original spot and then move along the same route. This is quick until I reach the new area. The lot on which this garden sits is loaded with invasives all around the edges: Garlic mustard, porcelain berry, swallow wort, bamboo of some sort. As I work in my newest area along the edge, I am coming across what looks like stubs of bamboo. I strip any leaves I see off these as I go along. That should work.

In my garden at home I chopped down a burning bush and had a problem with re-sprouting, but I kept cutting these off before they developed much of a leaf system and now no longer get sprouting (although I am still dealing with seedlings and think that I may have some re-sprouting at distance points along the original root system.) In full disclosure there are other pest plants in my yard that I have not yet been disciplined enough to get rid of using this method.

For small ones, I grab at the base with adjustable pliers and pull.

NHBabs, the small ones are definitely pull-able, tho not all the root comes up at time. It's the vines with roots underground the size of my thumb (!) that are so impossible. And the fact that the baby ones like to hide amongst the good plants to avoid being discovered in a timely manner! (Why do so many weeds mimic the good plant they are growing next to??)

Guess a lot of us battle with weeds on an ongoing basis. The large bulk of the problem here is seeding weeds which can be very easy to deal with, if caught early. I use a narrow-bladed English-style garden hoe (cutting edge up) which (as per David Tomlinson (Merlin's Hollow)) can be an extremely efficient way of dealing with the young of seeding weeds. I did once have to deal with the dastardly running bindweed (deep sympathies to Camp). There was not much of it and asarum's approach worked.

I can also well recognize prairiemoon2's problem with non-gardening neighbours. One of our amiable neighbours had a buckthorn tree in his garden. Birds like to relieve themselves while in and around the cedar hedge at the back of our garden. One year I stopped counting buckthorn seedlings as I pulled them out (stopped counting at 360). In terms of the natural environment, buckthorn trees are very invasive here. A couple of years back, that was an added rationale for us to pay to have the neighbour's buckthorn tree removed. Now, at least our garden buckthorn seed germinating problem is easily managed with the hoe.

That's a lot of expense to go to on behalf of your neighbors but I understand. We had a dead crabapple 5ft away on the their side of the fence staring at us for 5 years, and we finally did the same thing. [g]

We had Japanese knotweed start up along the road which I blame on the town's mower which probably brought pieces of it from the large patches down the road. My husband sprays the leaves with the heavy duty brush killer. It's never completely gone since we see a few stems every spring but the surrounding grasses and day lilies don't seem to be bothered. I had a bad weed pop up in the new asparagus bed. The weed is related to bedstraw and I didn't know it was a serious problem until our neighbor farmer was patrolling the hay fields. Now I am careful to pull it whenever I see it. I would don't want weeds from my property contaminating the hay fields.