My husband and I just got done pulling 30-40 tiny poison ivy plants from our lawn, ground cover, and garden. My guess is that the many birds and animals that inhabit the land around our house disperse seeds, because the plants don't seems to be connected by underground roots.
We argue about poison ivy removal every year, because I don't like to use herbicides/poisons, and he hates the manual pulling process, which seems to be only partially successful anyway. A few years ago, I let him spray on the poison ivy in our groundcover, and the spot has been virtually bare ever since. The groundcover is only now starting to re-colonize the spot, though (of course) the poison ivy re-colonized very quickly.
My question is this: does anyone know of something we could put down on the lawn to prevent the poison ivy seeds from sprouting, and how harmful this might be to other plants/ insects/ birds/ animals/ humans (i.e. how generally toxic)? I think some herbicides are considered "pre-emergence" killers, but I don't know much about them, or whether they would work for poison ivy. I'd love to not have to pull tons of little plants every year, but I also don't want to poison everything that lives around our house.
One unrelated comment - we live in Michigan now, but I grew up in Massachusetts where we were surrounded by poison ivy (and where I developed keen PI recognition skills). I met some landscapers there who said that they took pills (prescription, I think) every summer which made them immune to poison ivy. I haven't heard anything else about the pills, but they sounded useful if you have to deal with lots of poison ivy.
Thanks. |
