Kitchen Garden Forum

I have a varigated ivy planted at the foot of my toilet waste pipes to to hide the pipes.(Big mistake).How can i kill the ivy to prevent looming damage to the pipe work below ground. I can saw all the foilage off and
drill holes in the roots, but do not know what to use to kill off the roots
Help Please
Regards Brenjon

Put sodium chlorate weedkiller in the holes and seal them up with a bit of mastic or a string finished stump bandage of strong plastic.

Propriety stump killer is the alternative.

I used bleach to kill mine off after drilling holes in the trunk

Sodium Chlorate has been withdrawn, so that is probably out. Glyphosate is one of the few available weedkillers, and might work if you get a version with a good surfactant in it e.g Roundup Biactive, or if you damage the foliage a bit by beating it with a stick first.

If you simply kill ivy, you still have ivy but it is then dead ivy, which is very ugly. Dig it out, is my advice. Even ivy which has developed a stout trunk is nothing like as substantial and intractable as you might suppose it to be. It's very brittle, too: lever the trunk away from its support and it will crack off at the base. I hate seeing dead ivy left on the sides of buildings / half way up trees. The received wisdom is that it will fall away in time, but it doesn't.

I appreciate that the ivy will still cling to the wall even when dead, but I need to kill the roots so that they will not grow bigger and damage the pipes.I have some neat glysophate so perhaps I would be better to use that
Thanks for the advice
Brenjon

In my experience Ivy doesn't come back from the roots.

I had ivy growing up a wall and decided to remove it.
I chopped all the top growth off down to just below ground level and left it.
It hasn't come back yet after 3 years.

I have done this previously at my old house with an ivy trying to demolish an old dry-stone wall - same result.

By the way - the ivy when dried makes wonderful compost in your heap - crunch it up a bit first.

Added - look out for any existing suckers or layers away from the main root.

I have used a combination of these techniques.
One end of my allotment was particularly infested, it was eating away at an old flint and rubble retaining wall, I dug the roots out, put glyphosate over the parts which were gripping the lime mortar, having removed the easily shifted parts. Once the glyphosate had done its work, I removed the debris.

There is little regrowth but as the stuff is based outside my plot, I am only holding it back.

I killed mine that was growing over the shed very effectively with RootOut. with no regrowth. This has been withdrawn now but Tumbleweed make a similar product. I am now using this on 2 cob nut trees I've cut down. So far so good but it is early days yet to confirm if it's been successful or not.

Beryl.

Brenjon wrote:I appreciate that the ivy will still cling to the wall even when dead, but I need to kill the roots so that they will not grow bigger and damage the pipes.I have some neat glysophate so perhaps I would be better to use that

You'd be wasting your time and money using glyphosate neat. It only works when applied to foliage in any case, at the specified dilution. Ivy foliage tends to repel water and, therefore, any applied herbicide — it's seldom 100% effective. Ivy does not send up suckers nor is nearly as pernicious as is generally supposed. Any regrowth will be as surface-running growth which is very easily ripped out.
Really, though: dig it out already. You'll be glad you did.

My apologies folks it's Round-Up I am using especially for TREE STUMPS etc. NOT the usual one for weeds. This can be applied directly to the cut stump. But if rain is threatened its best covered.

Beryl.

http://www.roundup-garden.com/which_rou ... iller.aspx


Beryl.

It is sometimes better to kill ivy before tearing it off walls etc, to minimise the damage to the wall. You might do that by chopping it off at the bottom then leaving the top to die ?

The waxy nature of ivy leaves is why I suggested a glyphosate formulation with a good surfactant.