Once it gets going, it's a royal aitch to deal with. This stuff was
growing up the walls of the house, the trees, and on up the hill into
neighbors yards three houses down. While it is slower than kudzu, it
is just as invasive, in the end. If you're not willing to control it,
I'd remove it.

On Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:14:43 -0400, Tony
wrote:

Fran wrote:
English Ivy will grow and smother trees in east TN. My parent planted
it in thier backyard up against the woods where it was very shady.
When they passed, after 25 years, it was smothering the trees along
the edge of the woods.

I've only heard people from the west coastish areas having problems with
ivy. The say it smothers and kills trees. East coastish ivy seems to
do fine in almost full sun, for me anyway. Any that was in PA and now
in TN. We can get poison ivy that will smother and kill trees, but it's
pretty easy to walk around the trunk and cut all the poison ivy. No
need to remove it, soon it will be dead and allow sun to reach the tree
again.


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?

songbird wrote:
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.

Thanks, I figured I couldn't go wrong with free rotting wood! By
the way the hillside and the flat part didn't have a single worm
anywhere. They are now increasing every year.


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

It faces south. Gets a lot of sun from mid morning until 5 or 6 when a
mountain blocks the sun, then sometimes another hour of sun between 2
mountains. Rain is really sporadic. I would guess .5"/week from June
to september, maybe less. Depends on where the thunderstorms hit.


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.

OK, I suppose then I shouldn't be cutting up the pines and leaving the
branches with the needles on the hillside? I have other places I can
spread them out. I have some live older pines scattered here and there,
mostly a bare long 70 foot trunk with some green at the top where it
pokes through the other trees. There are areas in the woods where you
get a solid pine forest but not too large. Some kind of bugs killed
most of the pine forests just before I moved here. I haven't hiked it
again to see the progress it has made in 4 years.


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.

No, I do have it growing at various places on the hill. My Mom had been
planting it to help hold the soil from washing out.


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.

I'm still in between stages, the original subject line doesn't have much
to do with *this* thread which was about removing the English Ivy. My
goal is to keep amending the soil and thinning out all the new trees so
they aren't competing with each other. Then as they grow taller, I will
continue to thin them out. I'm not ready to start planting anything
yet, in another year or 2 or 3. Then it will hopefully be mostly shady
with the trees all around.

Tony