Wisteria

Here's what I'm going to do. I have two big honkers that I bought that were on a trellis leading to my front door. The label is still on them that claims they are Kentucky Wisteria- wrong! Anyway, I cut them back last fall once I started taking a close look at what I really had bought from Home Depot. Too late in the year to deal with them as the air temps were far too cold by then. This spring, I plan on placing a tarp behind each side of the trellis once the plants begin active growth. Tarps really help to avoid drift and overspray. Then I'm going to hit them up with Ortho's Brush B Gone. I might have to hit them up again two weeks later but after that they should be pretty well toast.

I ordered two replacement plants from a reputable source. They really will be Kentucky Wisteria.

This has been very informative. Thanks all.

I planted Austrailian Wisteria last fall ... 2. One died. Do I understand that the Aussie type is a bad one?

Do you happen to have a Latin name? The plant that I've heard called Australian Wisteria is Hardenbergia violacea which isn't a wisteria. For real wisterias I've heard of Chinese, Japanese, and American but not Australian so if it's a Wisteria I have no idea which species it is.

Hi, ecrane3 - nope no name but no matter. Both of them died so it's my luck! No wisteria, even though I love it.

my neighbor has killed three small wisteria in an attempt to get one to have even one flower. Here in New England, there are runaway wisteria, but up here on our windy hill, some things simply don't prosper. Also, I have never seen Buddleia davidii reseed itself. Our winters may be too cold for this.
We have an office building down in town that has a wisteria that has been trained as a standard and is kept in beautiful condition year after year. The historical society built a support for a huge dead wisteria branch that ran along the porch of their building. I told them it was dead, but apparently someone hoped against hope and built the supports. I noticed that it was taken down this spring.
Wisteria is not for the weak gardener. You have to be prepared to prune like crazy. and you're right if the gardener in your house before you was like that and your're not, you are in trouble.

Just wanted to show everyone how nice the native Wisteria can be. This is the cultivar "Amethyst Falls". It's only had a few blooms, but each year I get more. When I first planted it I didn't realize the sprinkler wasn't hitting it. So I can say it is very drought tolerant. Now, I make sure to water it every now and then when we're in a dry spell. It hasn't gotten very tall at all; in fact, I wish it would get a little bigger!

Beautiful! Absolutely Beautiful. I ordered two and have them in the ground. There are a few other cultivars I'd really like to get my hands on. These really are show stopper plants. Great photo!

You know, it smelled really good this year, too. Amazing how plants thrive when they get some water! I had it planted a whole year before I realized it wasn't getting anything but the rain. I don't know how it didn't die, but that's one benefit of native plants. I'm trying to grow it up an oak tree, but it insists on growing away from it. I'm threatening to get out there with a staple gun.

A staple gun? You wild woman you! Get the staples that are 1". They have smaller out there fore sale but the longer ones give the plant a little bit more room. How do I know this? I stapled Virgin's Bower (Clematis virginiana) to a brush pile once. I wanted it to go one way and it kept trying to make a break for the other direction. I won.

In the battle between me and Mother Nature, I'm often on the losing end. Maybe I can win this one!

I normally lose too.

I used my husband's staple gun. It's pretty powerful. First time I shot out of it, I was like wow. I couldn't help but think a person could do a lot of damage with one of those. It felt really good stapling into wasted buckthorns. One thing that took me a bit of getting used to was how to hold it farther away from what I was stapling so I didn't choke the vine. I screwed up quite a few times until my husband came out and showed me how I could rest it on something. Practice a little bit or else you end up sinking the vine into the tree. Those staple guns have a lot of force.

Hello, I'm new to these forums so forgive me if this has been covered. One eco-friendly way to get rid of a lot of invasive plants is brush goats if you can have them in your location. We fought wisteria my ggm had planted over 50 years ago that had spread thru the woods and were strangling everything it touched. We burned, dug and everything else with no success. My DH finally put his goats on them - they're crazy about wisteria it seems - it was gone completely the following summer and it's never showed back up. (This was a 25 acre plot of land that had the wisteria all over it. ) Luckily there are very few plants that are poisonous or harmful to brush goats and they'll eat just about anything. *L*

May our world be filled with brush goats! I've heard many people using them to control quite a few invasives so I know there is validity to your comments.

I like goats. I think they're little sweeties. Can't have them here though.

Welcome to you *L*!

Welcome! Maybe there's a market for "renting brush goats" for weed and invasive control. Someone should...........

There is a market for renting goats out here--we have big problems with fire danger in the summer because of all the dried up grass on the hills, so there are some people who do rent out goats to come out and munch up all the dried grass so it's not as much of a fire risk anymore.

That cracks me up! ROTFLMAO Of course someone has thought of it!

Well the goats are pretty darn handy with the wisteria but right now my biggest battle is with winter creeper. The previous owners of the house we purchased had it planted under and around every thing in my yard. I can't use the chemicals or sprays for health reasons. I can't use the goats because we have a lot of azaleas which to my bad luck "are" poisionous to goats. Any suggestions??

Euonymus fortunei (Winter Creeper) is a tough cookie but it is one that if you keep at it, you can get. Deadhead it so that birds don't spread it. That's really important so you don't create more work for yourself or for others. The seedlings are easy enough to yank out of the ground by hand. You're going to have to dig out the mature plants though. It doesn't exactly slide out of the ground like butter but you can get it out if you are persistent because every little piece left behind won't come back to haunt you. It's not rhizomatic. Just keep at it and you'll get it.

Rodeo doesn't have the same surfactant that RoundUp has and it's the chemical I prefer to use around here but AquaMaster is similar. You might want to read this and reconsider using chemicals-
http://www.litzsinger.org/research/lee.pdf