tree of heaven - grape vines

[buckhunter10]

What do you all do to control these?

My forest I believe suggested 1/3 diesel 2/3s GLY, no hack/squirt - just spraying bark.

What do you all suggest/use to spray/kill the trees?

 

[readonly]

I don't consider grape vines to be invasive and just leave them alone. Ailanthus...cut them during dry periods in summer and let deer eat the leaves. They will also browse the regrowth. They love it. If it was the only invasive I might worry about it but I don't consider it much of a threat and I'm too busy dealing with bittersweet, autumn olive, privet, etc.

 

[Tap]

I believe there are a few varieties of grapes. We've had some here for years that don't seem to spread and aren't much of a problem. But we also have other grapes that have invaded in the last 20 years that are definitely an issue. They spread like mad and smother just about anything they climb.
#1...DON'T cut grapes unless you plan on treating! They just sucker and produce a million vines instead of just one. Many vines seem to need a second year of treatment before they die.
I used Tordon for a couple years until the soil activity started hurting surrounding trees. I now do a 50/50 mix of gly/water. Some guys mix diesel with gly, but I've never done that...not really sure why I haven't.

Tree of Heaven...A lot of guys despise it and want to eradicate it. 1st, I have to say that the only places that I've seen it as an invasive, is where soil is poor and disturbed, and not much else wants to grow there anyway. I see mono cultures of it along highways where major excavation occurred, old construction sites and waste industrial sites where soil was disturbed years earlier. I don't see mono cultures of it on my property. I have it, but it doesn't take over and deer love the stuff.
I cut it every year during late summer. Deer will walk through healthy food plots and hammer the ToH leaves. I've posted before and after pics on several threads in the past where, within 24 hours, every single leaf was eaten.
I like having a limited amount of ToH on my place. It's a highly desired food when cut in late summer, it's a "junk" tree that I'm not afraid to cut, and it stump sprouts and a year later, I can cut it again. It's a perpetual food source, but it takes a little effort each summer to put it within deer's reach. I've had it for 30 years and it has not become invasive on my place. If it ever gets out of control, I'll cut and treat it, but I don't anticipate that will happen. If it ever does, then I'll deal with it.

 

[meyerske]

Honestly, you guys don't understand the disservice that you are doing by posting online that someone should cut tree of heaven.

Never cut tree of heaven, because it will spread so quickly it will make your head spin. It is horribly invasive. For trunk diameters greater than 6 inches, treat it by hack and squirt using straight triclopyr 3. For diameters less than 6 inches, you can treat it by basal treatment (spraying on bottom 15 inches of the trunk) using triclopyr 4 diluted with diesel fuel or crop oil at a ratio of 1 to 4.

I have never seen signs of deer eating actual tree of heaven on my farm. Tree of heaven closely resembles sumac, which deer love, and I wonder if people get the two trees confused.

Don't take my word for it, just Google tree of heaven and you'll soon find out how nasty it is.

 

[readonly]

How does cutting tree of heaven cause it to spread any more quickly then not cutting it? It spreads by seed...and the seeds stop growing when it's cut. And deer destroy tree of heaven....they eat the young trees and will clean a cut tree's canopy in short order. They also eat the stump sprouts after one has been cut. I only cut it during drought conditions because it provides a lot of food that would otherwise be in short supply at that time. I don't care for tree of heaven, but it is not in the same league as other truly destructive invasives that I focus time and money on when I get a chance. The guy that put the pond on my property over 40 years ago...he's dead now but I talked to him about 15 years ago... said they bulldozed massive paradise trees when they put the pond in. That lets me know the things have been on my property for probably 100 years or more. And we still have great mixed forest. And because I drop them every so often, not even any huge paradise trees. But in the last 20 years the bittersweet seems to slowly be getting leverage, and autumn olive showed up in the last 10 years and is spreading quickly. I am much more concerned about those two.

 

[meyerske]

If you cut it, it root-sprouts and instead of one tree now you have a hundred. This is not new information, look it up. You need to chemically treat it to kill it (except for seedlings which can be pulled out of damp soil).

Look, I'm trying to help you guys so you don't get into a situation like I was in. I've spent years trying to get this stuff off my property. Only now am I finally starting to get it under control.

 

[Tap]

Honestly, you guys don't understand the disservice that you are doing by posting online that someone should cut tree of heaven.

Never cut tree of heaven, because it will spread so quickly it will make your head spin. It is horribly invasive. For trunk diameters greater than 6 inches, treat it by hack and squirt using straight triclopyr 3. For diameters less than 6 inches, you can treat it by basal treatment (spraying on bottom 15 inches of the trunk) using triclopyr 4 diluted with diesel fuel or crop oil at a ratio of 1 to 4.

I have never seen signs of deer eating actual tree of heaven on my farm. Tree of heaven closely resembles sumac, which deer love, and I wonder if people get the two trees confused.

Don't take my word for it, just Google tree of heaven and you'll soon find out how nasty it is.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but in my case, on my land, it's just not true that cutting it causes it to spread. I've had a yearly "program" for at least 10 years of cutting it in September. I can't state this strongly enough...IN MY CASE, it has not spread one iota. In fact some tiny patches of a half dozen or so trees, have actually died out after several years of cutting it. And I have not treated the cuts. I cut it when it holds leaves, my deer hammer it, I repeat the next September, and so on. If anything, my ToH seems to be dying out. Not saying that it will behave that way on other properties, but in my case, it HAS NOT spread.

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[Chainsaw]

Grapevines here grow everywhere but really grow in the apple tree areas. We cut them as often as I get time. Some are then sprayed some are not; it depends what is around it. Deer browse the shoots and that is not such a bad thing to add to our browse supply. A few thousand trimmed grape vines make a lot of shoots.
One of the very important things we stumbled on to is that if the grape vine is cut at about three feet off the ground there is a high probability that deer will treat it as a licking stick and make paw marks under it in some spots. It can last ten years or more as a licking stick because since it is not touching the ground, it dries out between rains and takes a long time to rot. Of course we then have to cut that same grape plant then at ground level because leaving it three ft. tall is giving it too big of a start so in other words we end up cutting each vine twice.

The second thing I stumbled onto when cutting them with a handsaw is to make sure and hold the vine with one hand above the to be cut area and cut on a downward angle even if the vine is being held vertically. Those hand saws can really bite--A big OUCH with experience! And the final learning curve is to stop as soon as you get bored with it when cutting with the chainsaw. What happens to us when bored or tired is we eventually fail to let the saw hit full rev before touching the vine; the result is a saw that grabs the vine and runs up it causing us to lose control of the saw for a second--not good. No serious cuts were experienced but we were just lucky.

It seems that Tree Of Heaven behaves differently on different properties. We do not have Tree Of Heaven that I know of. We do have Black Locust though and like Tree Of Heaven, it is a root sprouter. Cut a black locust here and root sprouts will come up in great numbers some of them over twenty feet from the original tree; cut one in another area of the property and no root sprouts. It doesn't make sense to me but that is how it works here so it is not surprising to hear of such different "TOH" experiences on different properties of Meyerske and Tap.