Battling Chinese Bittersweet
A few years ago, while wandering in my yard I noticed some vines growing on a maple tree. They were about an inch in diameter and wrapped around each other. Looking at other bushes and shrubs nearby, I could see the vines were literally choking the other plants.
That's just not nice.
So I tried to pull up as many of the vines as I could. There were a lot. I had to use a bow saw on the big ones.
And then, pleased that I had made things a little better for the plants being stifled, I left, leaving the pulled vines and roots strewn about under the trees,
Over the next few years the vines returned and I tackled them with little interest. I'd pull them up or cut them back, knowing as I did it that they weren't going to be gone for long, but at a loss as to what to do to get rid them. Spraying with herbicides was not one of my ideas.
A few weeks ago, while camping, my brother mentioned he had been learning about invasive plants on the internet and was talking about Chinese Bittersweet. He showed me a picture on his iPhone. Those were my plants. And he told me how to get rid of them - cut the vine and apply a small amount of full strength brush killer.
That sounded like something I could do. It was more controlled and precise than spraying and I figured it would be possible to only attack the Chinese Bittersweet.
So I bought some stuff and went out in the yard.
It certainly wasn't difficult or strenuous, but it was tedious.
And so I resorted to pulling up the vines and putting them in a trash barrel. If I couldn't pull up the vine, I cut it and applied brush killer. If the vine was really large, I applied brush killer. If I got hold of a large root, I pulled out as much as I could, then cut it and applied brush killer to all the cut segments.
On Saturdays, I dump the barrel in the brush pile at the town dump.
I have no illusions that I will win the war against Chinese Bittersweet, but I can tell you there is a lot less of it in the yard than there was and some of it is dead.