Spent the morning cutting Bradford Pear

[firefighter ontheside]

I spent this morning cutting down Bradford pear trees.  They are an invasive species in this area.  So many were planted as ornamentals years ago.  They were supposed to be sterile and couldn't propagate themselves.  Well that was a lie.  The neighboring house had planted some many years ago.  They started showing up in my parents garden and dad swore they were offspring from his Crabapple.  I've finally convinced him that's not the case.  He had half a dozen that were 6-8" diameter and there are hundreds of seedlings.  I'm not sure we will ever be able to eliminate them, but maybe we can keep them from becoming big enough to spread seed.  We cut down all the big ones and all that were bigger than seedling.  I also convinced the new owner of the neighboring house to cut them down.  Then I went looking for them in the woods between parents house and mine.  Found one that was 3" diameter and another dozen or so that were saplings.  What a mistake these trees were to bring in as ornamental.  I guess that's the way with most invasive stuff.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  If you go up into St Louis there are acres and acres of these things, especially by highway interchanges where they had been planted at one time.

[wisconsitom]

Woody invasives suck mightily.  Up here it's buckthorn, non-native honeysuckle, crap like that.  Bits of Bradford here and there, not well established here yet.

Up at my land, just 60 miles north, no buck or honey yet.....but buckthorn's in Gillet, last town I go through on way there.

You're fighting the good fight👍

[firefighter ontheside]

Honeysuckle is a big problem here too.

[Machinebuilder]

Bradford pear is bad.

I have a lot of honeysuckle and russian olive.  it's hard to keep up with some things

[Ron Wenrich]

I believe the Russian olive, as well as multiflora rose were promoted as wildlife species.  They are until they get out of control. 

We had a nursery a couple of miles from my place.  Its since has moved on, but the amount of Bradford pear that has taken up on the adjoining farm's fence row is remarkable.  Abandoned fields are starting to quickly fill in with them.  I haven't found too much at my place.  But, as I look around, there's plenty in the towns and developments in the area.  As soon as you have landscapers involved, invasive species follow.  At least, that's the pattern I've seen.  Our state has called it invasive, and you can't buy it anymore.  I think I read that you have to put some chemical on the stumps or you'll get sprouting.

The other one that's taken off in my area is European bittersweet.  Another landscaping fiasco.  Vines can cover small trees in a few years.  I've seen them take down pole sized pine.  These vines also are along a lot of the highways, especially around urban areas.

[wisconsitom]

Cut-stump treatment=cut invasive shrubs or small tree at base, apply appropriate herbicide to stump surface.  Typical chemicals are glyphosate and triclopyr.  The latter seems best in most cases.

Basal bark treatment=applying herbicide solution to lowered 12 to 18
Inches of trunk or stems.

Both methods work.  Just depends on situation.  Addition of blue dye strongly recommended...otherwise it's too easy to lose track.

[firefighter ontheside]

Yep, I have olive, multiflora and honeysuckle and now bradford pear.  Honeysuckle and pear concern me more, because they seem to fill up an area quickly.  What's the most environmentally friendly herbicide to kill this stuff with.  My wife does NOT like herbicide, especially round up.  She'd rather have a field full of poison ivy than spray round up.

[btulloh]

Hate to tell you this but Roundup (glyphosate) is probably the most environmentally friendly herbicide. The recent jury awards have more to with jury selection than science. And now the trial lawyers are burnng up the airwaves with ads.  Talcum powder, ear plugs, water, air, dirt - all deadly from what I see on TV ads. lol  

There was one study in Belgium that the lawsuits against glyphosate are based on.  It was determined to be flawed during peer review and even by the people who did the flawed study. Glyphosate has been studied by more agencies in more countries for a long time and there has been only the one flawed study that came up negative. (That's not say though that spraying on mature wheat shortly before harvest is a good thing IMO.)

If your wife is that much against it though, that sorta trumps science usually. Excavate the area down to about 2 feet,  run the dirt through a sterilizing trommel, the haul it at least two states away.  Then move. lol

[wisconsitom]

These techniques use tiny amounts of product.  There is no overall spraying going on, just daubing a bit of herbicide solution, i.e. mostly water, to cut stump surface, or careful app of same, to lower stems, so already extremely safe and enviro friendly.

Pretty hard to get in any kind of trouble with this sort of treatment.

[firefighter ontheside]

She is very much in favor of science.  She just may not have done her own research on roundup.  Good point though, about only applying to the stumps and not a general spraying.  That may be the key.

[thecfarm]

Can this area be mowed?
I don't know your climate. Frost here until maybe early May and maybe late Sept.
I claimed back some of the old pasture by mowing it every couple weeks. I can kill anything for trees and bushes by a steady mow.

[btulloh]

It's easy for the average person to come to the conclusion that glyphosate causes cancer due to the tv and radio ads.  This gets picked up and echoed by our friends, the "journalists " and over time it all gets repeated so much that it becomes an assumed fact. (Hmmmm . . . sounds like a familiar pattern . . .)

Here's a link to some info on the EPA website that is more fact based if anyone is interested https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyphosate. 

It's also important to understand that Roundup used to mean "glyphosate" but now "Roundup" has turned into a general product category.  There are now Roundup products that contain other herbicides so check the label. Many of these herbicides are soil activated so are more problematic than glyphosate. As always, following label information for application and handling are necessary for personal safety as well as environmental safety.

[Dan_Shade]

I hate bradford pear.  

The only "good" thing about them is they bloom before anything else around here which would make spring time hacking very ft focused. 

[Otis1]

I saw somewhere that a person made a pesticide "dauber" out of PVC pipe. It sorta looked like a potato cannon. One end was capped with a slit cut for a folded sponge to fit, the other end had a screw cap to fill, also a shutoff valve towards the working end. Bulky, but it looked like it would work pretty slick for cut stump treatment. Probably a knock off of some commercial tool but looks easy enough to make with readily available parts.

[wisconsitom]

There's legitimate concerns about glyphosate.  But it ain't some guy working to beat back some invasive brush, it's the fact it's in all our food, water, bloodstream, etc, so useful is it in the current ag model.  In that regard, it's even used to "burn down" certain crops to get them all to senesce at the same time, to enable harvest.  It's the fact millions of cropland acres are all being treated with the same chemistry, leading to herbicide-resistant "super weeds", a real thing.

But it isn't someone with a backpack sprayer full of the stuff, doing careful restoration work.

We always chuckled about the glyphosate fixation;. What would the general public think about the garlon, phenoxys, the imazypyr, the aminopyralids, all the other stuff we used, that they never heard of!😦

[wisconsitom]

Hey Otis1, yes, such gizmos exist.  But good idea worth mentioning.

A lot of guys seem to end up using these cheap hardware store one-hand held sprayers for cut-stump.

I dunno, my job was to tell them what needed doing, not how to do it!  These were pro companies.

[Ianab]

There is a local company they makes a herbicide that's concentrated from pine needles. There is some chemicals in them that tend to naturally suppress weeds / competition around pine trees, so there is some valid science behind it.   But no one has done any extensive testing about how safe those "natural" chemicals actually are over the long term. Lots of things are "natural" but also toxic. 

[firefighter ontheside]

I have used a mix of water, vinegar and dish soap to kill poison ivy successfully, but it takes several repeated applications to work.  I don't know if it would work on pear.

[wisconsitom]

You won't be killing any established woody invasives with such items.  Things like triclopyr(Garlon and numerous other trade names), and glyphosate, are systemic herbicides that translocate thru the plant's vascular system and kill roots and all.

Things like vinegar can't do that.  This is a different realm.

[SwampDonkey]

Years ago the word 'Roundup' was banned when it came to forestry in Canada. They renamed it Vision, then they could use it. :D

[wisconsitom]

Generic equivalents abound.  The original patent is long expired.

[SwampDonkey]

Vision and VisionMax are trademarked by Monsanto Technology LLC. Roundup and Vision are both Monsanto products. But I think Bayer owns them now. And this year Bayer are pulling Roundup from store shelves from residential customers in the US, farmers will still be able to get it. It's only available in Canada to residential customers as diluted/premix. Been that way for about 10 years.

I use it here on burdock, spot spray on each plant. Does the job. ;D