Gardenbite: Cut Stump Herbicide Treatment to Control Bush Honeysuckle | #GoodGrowing

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, horticulture educator with the University of Illinois Extension coming at you from Macomb, Illinois, and we have got a garden bite for you this week. It is the most wonderful time of the year. You know what I'm talking about, killing honeysuckle. And right now is a great time to be slaying that honeysuckle because it is the only green thing that seems to be left in our understory, easy to see, and it is still susceptible to a lot of our treatments.

This week in the video, I demonstrate, not only what we did last year, what was hand pulling some of the little honeysuckle, but also chemically treating the stumps of cut honeysuckle. Enjoy. Last year, about this time, we talked about pulling up honeysuckle by the roots. Now we can do this with small honeysuckle, and I encourage you to keep doing this on your fall walks. If you need help identifying honeysuckle, this time of year, it is a really easy task.

It is one of the only green things left in the understory. Another interesting thing that helps in identifying honeysuckle is the leaf tip is acuminate, which means it comes to a point that almost looks like as if someone took a piece of clay and pinched it with their fingers and pulled on it. The other thing to know about honeysuckle and identifying it is that it has a hollow pith or inner stem. But what happens if the honeysuckle is too big to pull up? Let's come over here.

So if you have a plant that is too big to pull out of the ground yourself, you're gonna need some tools to help you. You can use lockers, you can use a saw, or I use a sawzall. Or you could use a nice handy dandy little electric chainsaw as well. Now for a bush honeysuckle this large, you can't pull this up, and if we would cut it, we would just have to come back and cut it over and over and over again until we exhaust the root system. This is when we employ another tool, herbicide.

Now that we have got our honeysuckle cut, it is time to apply herbicide solution. What we are using today is going to be a glyphosate solution. It's gonna be at a 50% strength in terms of its concentration in here, and we've added a little bit of blue dye so we can see where we've been. Now time to treat our honeysuckle. Come on down.

So when we treat our honeysuckle, the living tissue of a woody plant is on the outside. So we use our applicator here which is pretty much just like a foam envelope sealer and we just apply to the outside. There's no reason to apply to the center of the stump because there's no tissue in there to absorb it. So with that we have our blue dye in there so we know we've been here before. It's also really important that we make this herbicide application within twenty minutes of cutting it because we don't want the cells to seal off in this location which would then inhibit the herbicide uptake which will then take it down to the root system and kill the whole plant.

Hopefully, we won't have to come back in and cut and treat. I hope everybody you enjoy your walk in the woods this weekend and into the fall and the rest of the winter. Remember, keep slaying that honeysuckle. Well, was some interesting information about how we can use herbicides to help us in our control of the invasive species bush honeysuckle. And a special thank you to Ben for helping me record that.

I'm not quite sure what filter he put on the video there, but it was a little glowy there for some of it. Well, but anyway, thank you, Ben. Well, the Good Goring podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Chris Hinroth. And a special thank you and a happy thanksgiving to all of our listeners and viewers. So thank you for doing what you do best and that is listening, or if you watched us on YouTube, watching.

And as always, keep on growing. You need help in identifying a honeysuckle about this time of year in mid to late November? That's great. Hi. Excuse me.

Okay. Okay. Is this still recording? Yeah. Okay.

Ready? Yeah. We're almost done. I promise, sweetheart. It's cold.

Are you still recording? Yeah.