How to Get Rid of Kudzu - tips from expert volunteers

all right where's the kudzu up top to the right this this ridge this knoll here and this going down to the creek was covered in katsu two three years ago when i first came up here it was about knee-high when you're walking which is tricky on a slope because you can't see your feet and you don't know what's under you like these dead logs that were covered you can see behind me it can just jump up and over one that's four feet in the air and you can see the dead vines there or behind it another fallen tree that is over but all of that was here just like that but it was bright green and thick so at the time we started hand digging the crowns out of each one and this little area i mean might have 50 crowns at that time and so you don't get them all every time but you get some and you thin it and thin it there is a spray that will work in the woods it'll kill only kudzu and it's called transline because kutsu is a legume part of the pea family and that's all trans wine can kill is pea family it leaves azaleas and trees and grasses and everything else so it's safe one to use but you have to do it more than once at least twice a year uh it's making progress if you look up the hill a little bit you'll see some green covering that's all uh wild geraniums that were here that we had no idea we also found blood roots coming up another wild it was here even though years of kutsu hadn't killed it it was there all along so it's progress but it's a takes a lot of time and a lot of maintenance to bring it back to what it was at one point before petsu invaded older roots older crown big taproot and out it comes so in one little area we have three good-sized crowns already and we keep finding more uh this is chloe hopefully she'll stay out of the video and this is a kudzu it's a big vine a kudzu two mang vines coming in one here and one here and then it's all leading down into under the ground under the ground will be a crown the crown is probably in this case a fist size uh piece of vegetative material that is the manufacturing part of the plant what that does is it generates the vines it generates the roots and stuff and uh without that crown the manufacturing part of the plant the whole plant dies so my job is to get below that crown and cut it off from the uh from its roots the roots proceed on downward from the crown and they can go anywhere from i don't know two to three feet or longer and it's just a starch or a resource for the rest of the plant if you just if you disremember the roots from the crown the whole plant dies wow this is gonna be a nice nice one so you can see this right here this is the crown right there it's about the size of a what a tennis ball and coming off the crown are the roots this is a root here there's a root there there's a root that's going down to the bottom so if i cut off these three roots one two three from the crown right here i've just i've disconnected the food source for the rest of the plant everything from this point on up is going to die so that's the beauty of doing it this way and you can do it any time of the year you can do this in the winter the summer doesn't matter when you do it you're going to knock out or kill the plant well it's a beautiful forest and it speeds two creeks one on each side of this knoll and katsu chokes everything out and then it'll spread itself down the creek into the rivers and down the waterways as it has in the paclet river going down towards the broad when they say kutsu is invasive it's an understatement it it it's a tough plant you respect it but there's no enemies to kutsu in this part of the world there seem to be in its native area in asia because it doesn't take over like this it grows more like a basic vine wood around here like a trumpet vine so i've been a kudzu warrior for i guess since 2011 or 2010 i've been doing this for 10 or 11 years it started out with pacquillette conservancy which is was stationed in polk county north carolina and they've since merged with the conservation group that was in uh hendersonville now they call themselves conserving carolina and uh we've had over the years anywhere from two volunteers to 10 11 and we always been working on mondays uh and we've cleared up kudzu probably i don't know 15 acres of most invasives and have made this park wood wilder forest much more amenable to native plants and grasses and trees and have restored a lot of the beauty of this of this forest um over the years uh well especially in the last i would say two to three years we've had a lot more volunteer interest and movement we've had a lot more people come and actually stay with us currently we're probably at six strong volunteers meaning that almost every week we can count on anywhere from four to six people coming and uh that does a a lot as far as making an impact on uh removing invasives usually we stay here for two hours and we go for coffee afterwards as far as as far as community interest i've seen that it seems to be growing there's a lot more people that are interested in in protecting their property from kudzu and other invasives and one of the things that people can do if they're interested in removing it is the contact conserving carolina um and or any conservation group because there's usually a subgroup within the conservation organization that's working at removing invasive plants and if they don't have the information for you they can point you to somebody that does have that information so you can see had a couple of signs up there that was a test spot for our first spray just you know and found out that if you spray in parts or april it doesn't do any good i mean it kills it and by june it's back uh-huh it doesn't suck those nutrients the chemicals yeah so when we started using transline during blooming season which is august september and we just quit we do it again it sucks it in then because it's trying to bloom and seed and then you come back in the spring what we're going to try again this spring is take a light spray when the little seedlings come up so i can show you we'll see around here they sprout from seed too that's rare but here we are cultivating it by digging it's like in cultivating and the seeds start and we realize wait a minute this is never ending you're going to have to have something for maintenance each year maybe just once like you do for bermuda grass or crabgrass or something but still right you know otherwise you'll come back in three years and go what the hell yeah you

Channel: Conserving Carolina

Views: 26,570

Keywords: kudzu, conserving carolina, asheville, north carolina, wilderness, outside, conservation, invasive species removal

Id: r-WptQvwJ-c

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020