Tony wrote:
songbird wrote:
Tony wrote:
Fran wrote:
English Ivy will grow and smother trees in east TN. My
parent
...
Hmm. I have some my mom planted on a steep hill and she also
made
up some nice big flower pots and the English Ivy found its
way in a
nearby crack between the walk and the slab the house is on.
The
stuff she planted on a hill could get out of control one day
when
I'm not looking, should I kill it all while I can?

is it growing on trees or the house?

if not, i'd leave it alone, killing it off
would mean possible soil erosion problems
on the hillside, weeds getting established,
etc.

if you want to try other plants there
clear an area and plant them and see
if they can manage the soil/location.
if they fight it out with the ivy and win
i'd say you're replacing one problem
with another. get my drift?

i.e. why fix what isn't broken unless
you have other goals for that area?
....
This takes a bit to explain but I'll try. The first owner of
the
house didn't want to pay for any more excavation than
necassary, so
the hill/mountian side came at an angle to within 3 feet of the
rear
of the house. The 2nd owners had that bulldozed so there could
be a
flat area, a lawn and whatnot behind the house. Two years
after
excavation hardly a weed grew in the heavy clay. The new
steeper
hillside had big ruts from getting washed out. The flat area
for a
lawn was still all clay. I moved here and first worked on the
steep
slope that was getting washed out, I kept taking rotting trees
and
branches from the woods and throwing it on the clay hillside.
What
ever grew I let it stay. Over the years I kept throwing more
dead
and rotting trees and branches on it. 5 years later it's
mostly
green, but lots of weeds, but also many pine and other trees.

sounds pretty nice for what you started with.

which direction does it face and how
much rain do you get in mid summer?


The
pines are so numerous I let most of them get 5' tall then cut
them
down if I don't want to keep them, I'm just keeping a few pines
there. I let them grow first to let their roots hold the soil,
and
eventually rot and help amend the heavy clay soil. The area is
about
15 feet uphill and 70' wide. I've cut down close to 100 pines
already from 3 to 6 feet tall, they grow like weeds. Actually
it is
all mostly weeds, anything to hold the soil in place. In
another
year or so I will start working around the better trees I want
to
stay and things I planted like mountain laurel and some
hardwood
trees that grew naturally. Well if you got this far, behind
all this
up on the hill starts the woods. So if it got out of control
there
is could be a problem becasue I only own so many feet back.

*nods* the trouble i see coming is that
the pines tend to challenge almost anything
underneath them with the pine needles they
drop. even on a slope because you have
it somewhat under control.


So after all that, I could start digging up English Ivy without
doing
much damage to the hill. It's probably clay underneath so I
could
just throw in some more dead rotting logs and it doesn't take
long for
something natural to grow up right next to the rotting logs.
For now
almost anything goes but soon I will begin to focus on a plan
and get
selective about what I leave grow. It's way to big and steep
for a
tidy garden, more like leave nature do it's job and try to keep
cutting or digging up what I don't want.

oh, ok, so you don't have english ivy
growing there at present. gotcha.

i like the creeping phloxes, but i'm
not sure how they would do when clay
gets rock hard in the summer. it might
be fine on your slope because of the
organic matter already incorporated
which would hold moisture and cool
off the surface. i like that they don't
grow "up" things.


songbird