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Comment by bluntfang | Hacker News Reader

any suggestions for a poison ivy patch? I'm doing the rounds of vinegar and placing tarps/boxes over the area, trying to avoid the nuclear option.

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You may already know this, but for anyone who doesn't: fire is not an option. The oils in poison ivy can become an aerosol, and get into your lungs. Don't use a flame weeder, or a burn barrel.

Some options:

* If the ivy is near pavement, you could scald it with a tea kettle.

* Add a bird bath and/or salt lick to the yard to encourage white-tailed deer to snack on it.

* Get a goat.

1) Trim what you can

2) Dig up what you can

3) See if you can find a syringe so that you can actually inject vinegar directly into whatever is left. Apply as close to the root as possible.

Poison ivy is an acceptable use case for glyphosphate in my opinion. Get rid of that stuff asap.

Cut it back and suffocate it in mulch. Might take a while before the roots run out of power.

Can you not dig it up?

That's kind of a very very long repeated / endless process for poison ivy in my experience. Especially if it is in a less than easy access location.

I think that's going to be part of my plan, but my housemate is extremely sensitive/allergic, so if I can avoid getting near the plant that would be awesome.

Do you have a way to get a lot of newspaper or large format cardboard? If the former, look up Morag Gamble, the latter, sheet mulching. Weed barriers will buy you a few years and then need to be dug up. Cardboard or paper biodegrade in a year (an extra thick layer of wood chips extends the effective period), so nothing to dig up and no microplastics.

Weeds are opportunists. They tend to grow where other things don't want to. Better soil will invite other things in besides weeds.

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