Complete Wisteria Vine Removal
We have Joe in Louisville, who says, ‘a few years ago, my wife fell in love with wisteria and I planted some, and now I am ready to get rid of it. Is there anything I can do to literally kill this plant? It is coming up in my yard, 30 feet away from where it’s planted and it’s a mess. I’m just ready to get rid of this 100%. It’s up into the cherry tree, the cherry tree leaned out far enough now that it is wanting to take over my grape harbor. And that’s the important thing to me. I want to get rid of this thing so my grapes come back good.’
They’ll grow up to, up to 30 feet a season. They are a very aggressive vine. And if there’s structures there, it’ll actually probably eventually choke the tree out, but it becomes a tree as the trunk ages. We’ll have people come in and ask for wisteria trees sometimes. All that is, is just an old vine where the vine trunk itself is rigid enough that it will support the head of the tree.
You can be extremely aggressive on pruning a wisteria, and you’re not going to hurt that plant at all.
If you’re just looking to get rid of this thing completely, digging out the root system is the most effective way. It’s going to be twirled and wrapped around everything. It’s going to take some time to cut it off everything and pull it out of there. So if it’s in the actual yard itself, a Weed Be Gone product would kill it out of there.
The problem with putting any type of chemical in the soil, it’s also going to kill all the things around it. Your best bet would be to cut it up into small sections, pull it off the tree, unwind it, because they generally grow in a spiral fashion.
Anything that comes back from the base after you cut it off on the ground, if you don’t dig the stump out, spray it with Roundup and you’ll have to spray it probably four or five, six times over a course of a year.
There is a saying, if you drive a copper nail into a tree, it’ll kill it. No, generally not. Copper is one of the things that the root system doesn’t like, but I’ve never heard of it killing a tree specifically. Usually a tree will encapsulate something that’s foreign and prevent it from growing.
Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).
