By CHRISTOPHER KAZARIAN
Meghan Hanawalt from Get My Goats brought Mac (left) and Ivy to clear some of the brush at the Falmouth Art Center.
Poison ivy is the one plant no one wants in their yard, but there’s only one problem—It’s pervasive in our region. “It is absolutely everywhere,” said Jesse Hamilton, the landscape division manager for Hamilton Tree & Landscape.
The first step to eradicating it? Identification.
“In the spring, the biggest thing you can do is to identify it,” he said, something he learned the hard way when he was a kid. “I never made that mistake again. It has a very unique growth habit to it. It can be a vine running 40 feet up a tree or a little single stem in an understory 12 to 18 inches tall with little white berries on it.
“If you can identify it, you are way ahead of the game and can come up with a plan of attack for how to remove it or call someone to remove it,” he continued.
The plant comes out of its dormancy in April or May, said Meghan Webb, director of horticulture at Outerland.
“They are in a three-leave configuration,” she said, which is where the saying, “leaves of three, let it be” comes from. Its leaves are shiny and, in the fall, can turn a brilliant red, yellow, or orange.
Once you’ve identified poison ivy, that’s when the fun begins—removing it either yourself or hiring a professional to do the job for you.
“If you have a very little, get some inexpensive gloves and pull it out, but be cognizant to get rid of it at a disposal facility,” Hamilton said. “The oil from the plant can stay on your tools, stay on your clothing, and can stay on your skin. …The hazard is that the oil is still on the stem. People think once it’s dead, it can’t hurt me anymore, which isn’t true.”
The real challenge comes in, Hamilton said, when you have a lot of poison ivy.
One option is to spray poison ivy with glyphosate, an herbicide that can be purchased at big box stores. “It can be very effective,” he said, Although he warned “it kills anything it” is sprayed on.
At Outerland, Webb and her team prefer using an organic herbicide. “I’m not a fan of glyphosate because it’s not great for the environment,” she said, noting that the only way to fully eradicate poison ivy is to remove all the vines and roots as best as possible. “It requires a good amount of physical labor.”
Homeowners should wear good, sturdy gloves and clothes that cover the body as much as possible. She also recommended using loppers to cut the plant and grub hoes to remove the root system.
Once it’s removed, Webb said, homeowners should dispose of it in a landfill. “Definitely don’t burn it because if it gets into the blood stream it can be a rough situation,” she said. “You also don’t want to mix it in with your compost because it will come back.”
Homeowners should wash their clothes, including their gloves, on several cycles, using hot water to remove the oil.
“Be prepared to see it come back,” she said. “That’s why it’s invasive. It grows prolifically. Anticipate it coming back for a couple of years until you get good management of it.”
This is where a professional landscaper like Outerland or Hamilton Tree & Landscape can come in handy.
“We have certified applicators who can spray and treat for it,” Hamilton said. “We have all the tools and machinery to remove it. You’re setting yourself up for success, versus having the homeowner trying to deal with it, which may take a while.”
Goats are another option. “It’s a neat management tool,” said Webb. “A friend of mine and fellow account manager used [them] for an account in Chatham and it worked well.”
It’s a tactic that Stacey Greaves, owner of Goat Green Cape Cod, has been employing since 2015, a year after rescuing four goats from western Mass. “I started it out of a combination of a lot of things, from adopting goats to my love for the environment,” she said. “There was nothing like this offered on Cape Cod, so it made sense to offer a natural solution to get rid of invasives without impacting the aquifer.”
Starting a business in which goats were the ones doing the bulk of the work—eating invasive plants like poison ivy—initially required “a lot of education of the public,” Greaves said. “Social media and word of mouth have been strong. Now we do commercial, residential, municipal properties and even land trusts.”
Greaves starts by looking at a site to determine where her goats should be placed and to give an estimate for how long it may take for them to remove an area of vegetation. She will install an electric fence around the goats and where they will be working, shelter them, and provide water buckets. “All the customer is responsible for is giving them water,” Greaves said.
Her goats typically work from April to the beginning of December and have traveled all over the Cape.
The length of each job varies, based on weather and the thickness of the plants to be removed. “Let’s say you have a quarter of an acre of meadow grass, low-lying stuff. It could take a team of goats two to three days,” she explained. “With thick underbrush and heavy vines, that same area could take my goats a week to nine days.”
Along with poison ivy, goats will eat phragmites, bittersweet, English ivy, wild roses, autumn olive, and buckthorn. “It is vegetation management,” Greaves stressed. “It is not a one-time cure because poison ivy comes in from all different directions. …We keep it at bay, especially if it’s a small contained area. That’s when you’ll see long-lasting results.”
She said her goats serve as a perfect complement to landscaping companies in removing poison ivy. “We work well with landscapers,” Greaves said. “It often helps them with a job that can be overwhelming.”
Perhaps the best part is that her goats give homeowners and business owners a fun, unique approach to lawn care. “They are funny, fun and are very easygoing,” Greaves said. “They love people, so you can pet them. They all have different voices, so I can tell the difference between them even when I’m not looking at them. They are just fun to be around.”