Yucca, You Must Die

Anyone have a great way to kill Yucca once and for all? Spraying anything on it does not seem to work. Cut and spray that honking root with tricyclopir? Anybody have a successful method?

Kevin...who has a good example of what happens when Yucca is left alone for 30 years.

WOW I was warned years ago, not to plant it and I didn't, although I've been tempted. Mama got a backhoe to come in and dig hers up, then she got out her spade and got rid of every little root.

Good Luck,

Judy

If it's fairly large they tip over easily. If you're not worried about scratching your lawn mower you could just run into it and push it over. Then you would need a sharp shovel to pick out the leftover roots. I only have one that I planted where nothing else would grow. It's amazing how fast they spread.

Maybe you can build a fire on top of the root?

There are at least 100 of them

Fire would not work, most yuccas are adapted to surviving wildfires.

Resin

Kevin, we both need a plan. I have the same problem. The previous owner let them run wild. I have a Border Collie that likes to lick everything, dirt is her favorite. She eats it out of my pots in my green house! So I have to be careful how I use chemicals and make sure they are fenced off. Did you try gas or motor oil?

Can't you eat Yucca? Have a BBQ!!! :)

Nicole

Kevin,
Short of embracing yucca for the uncommon sword like structure it can add to almost any garden. I think you need to set a realistic plan in motion and in my experience it will probably take three years to get an established bed under control. I was given the job once (when I was young and foolish) to remove a 10' x 8' very mature bed and after two years of hand digging down to molten magma we brought in a bobcat on the third year and covered the area with black cloth new soil and mulch. The next spring the yucca was poking it's head out of the edges of the cloth but I will admit at that point the digging was more under control. I did notice recently that new home owners have allowed that bed to become part of a field of native grasses, hmm I wonder if lurking somewhere...? kt

Kevin:

There's got to be some tequila-lovin' DGers who'll come harvest your yucca to death; just tell 'em it's a cold-hardy agave.

I could never manage to kill the 5 very large plants at my parent's house with a lawnmower when I was growing up.

I like yucca. Figures, huh?;>)

Absolutus ignoramus here. Never heard of such a problem in our northern reaches. Do these come up from root suckers (excuse the redundancy)? Or are they seeding around? Are these filamentosa's?

Yucca is a monocot. I don't think triclopyr would work anyway, even if you could get it absorbed somehow.

At my old house, i had tons of these things... i found they'd die if planted in the shade...but then you still have the "mother" plant.

I once thought of pouring gasoline on it... but we ended up moving... and they are all still there, multiplying.

What waaaaas my mother thinking when she planted it (which turned into hundreds!!!)

The root system goes down so deep, that when it's being dug/pulled/hatcheted out of the ground - the root snaps off, and just keeps growing back.

Wow, I better really like it, huh? Forewarned is forearmed.

I like the flower too. Course I don't have them in my yard.

I wonder if you couldn't cut it down as far to the ground as you can and immediately douse th thing in buttermilk? Buttermilk helps work for killing other tree roots, why not a Yucca?

Try rock salt. Cut the top off, drill a hole drop some salt in.

You could send it to those who really appreciate them. I dug one up several years ago and it hasn't grown much at all. In fact, one of them just died last year for some unknown reason.

the city destroyed my 50 year old stand of yuccas that kept errant little boys out of my yard. I think the guy that did it is still in the hospital. They simply whacked them off, then ran over them with a lawnmower set even with the surface of the ground. Every week. Until Dead.

It's actually recommended for planting beneath windows. It keeps the burglars out.

How tall does it get, and how fast does it grow? I bet you it's lots taller and faster-growing in AL than in IL. leaflady, maybe it was due to it's long taproot? Those kinds of plants don't always transplant easily.

Yucca transplants very easily. Just put an offset on the surface of the ground and forget it, and the first thing you know it is rooted and growing. Dont think it has much of a tap root. Ht.? It is a clump of thorny edged spikes that rise on top of a central trunk. Looks, sort of like a joshua tree if youve been out west.
Really hurts to get spiked with the edge thorns or the tip of the leaf which is a 1/2 inch barb. Mine were about 5 ft high, but they do form a clump. My clump was about 12 x 12 ft. But about august the plants shoots up a lily type bloom. I think it has medicinal value besides protecting your property. You can grow it from seed, but an offset is faster.

http://helios.bto.ed.ac.uk/bto/desertecology/yuccas2.jpg

Lovely Yuccas.

This message was edited Mar 20, 2007 8:42 PM

Can you just drown it? Put a constant drip on it now when it is cold and see if you can rot it away. What about dumping a bag of iron sulfate or something similar that would make the soil inhospitable but eventually fine. Maybe a javelina could help. They eat that stuff for breakfast.

And VV, if I am the tequila loving sucker you speak off, I'll take a whack at digging it up if you do the fermenting. Who needs blue agave anyways. Pulque on the house!

Willis

Could you try leaving about 6 inches of leaf standing and tarp it with black plastic for about six weeks? Cook it to death and block all sunlight. I killed houttuynia with this strategy.

This message was edited Mar 20, 2007 9:50 PM

I am with you Leftwood, never heard of them up north like that! Of course they are all over the place here....I don't have any and think they're ugly.

There is a reason they are called YUCKA (lol). I hate them. We had a large clump that was planted by the previous owner of our house. I offered them on Freecycle and a guy came and dug about 50 divisions. He didn't want anymore, so I dug the rest and put them in a black plastic covered pail to rot. Those died...however, I noticed the other day (this is March in Michigan, mind you) that there are all sorts of little baby yuccas growing. DANG IT!.

There are so many kinds of Yucca. The kind I have is called "Spanish Bayonet" and looks very different from that last photo. I'll try to get a picture of mine tomorrow.

Escambiaguy I have the same as you. I'm not really sure what these guys are talking about.

CoreHHI, my yucca looks EXACTLY like yours...minus the brown stem-things on the bottom.

A monocot, eh? Perhaps Poast or similar would make it easy(the fluaziflop, Fusilade types)

This Texas publication suggests triclopyr is the way to go:

http://goliad-tx.tamu.edu/applied/yucca.pdf

I think I will break them off and pour an evil concoction on the stem--triclopyr, Roundup Pro, Poast.....DIE YUCCA DIE!!!!

That would surely break its spirit.

Scott

Resin: that looks like a photo of the local city maintenance department here. Is there a Cherry Picker in the background. Combine that strategy maybe with a photo of Hulk Hogan. Surely, that would be effective.

Dig some up, pot them up and sell them!
The Home Depot has them for sale for $25, (I think straight Yucca even).
Will

I think shortleaf/leaflady above have the best idea. these are really valuable plants in the right place.

This is a discussion about burning out tree stumps and using 2,4, D herbicides. I think the conclusion was that smothering was the best solution when you are trying to clear land to plant something else.

http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/699801/

i.e. "smothering" soil solarization with black plastic (light deprivation, cell destruction by lethal temperature).

I remember someone said they pounded in canned food cans over the root.



This message was edited Mar 21, 2007 2:50 PM

Interesting about trichlopyr. I just assumed (shame on me) that since it doesn't hurt grasses, it was because they were monocots.

Here's a picture of mine. This spot gets so dry sometimes in the summer that couldn't get anything else to grow there (except maybe Optuntia).

That's a little different then mine. The leaves die back on mine. New leaves come out and a few old ones turn brown.

We have Yucca filamentosa here, it's one of the plants people seem to either love or hate, no in-between. It is native to the southeastern U.S.

http://www.botany.wisc.edu/garden/db/speciesdetail.asp?genus=Yucca&species=filamentosa


edited to add: the ones I have seen are not as blue as those pictured, there are cultivars with gold and cream-colored edges

This message was edited Mar 21, 2007 9:57 PM

Every Mexican restaurant with the room for them had them planted next to the parking lot, back when I was in Illinois. Only in one place, a few blocks from where I grew up and not associated with a restaurant, did they seem invasive, and I always thought that they'd spread along the hillside by seed. Never investigated closely: it was a roadside next to an old farmhouse that had been there long before our suburbia encroached. Eventually that farmhouse was torn down and the hillside and its yuccas bulldozed so that new houses could be built there, and that was the end of them. Perhaps a bulldozer is the answer...

I lived in Montana for a while and there were a lot of smaller cold-hardy yuccas on the high plains. Again I assumed that they propagated from seeds... now I'm not so sure. They were native.

Now, down here in Florida, it seems that a lot of the farms have a tree yucca planted near the driveway, and they don't seem to be invasive at all. They'll form a small clump of stems, but no more. Or do I need to stop and look more closely rather than just drive past? Maybe they're spreading. I think that we have at least one native species of tree yucca here, though.

Mark., I still want a Joshua tree, if they can take the wet

CoreH, I liked the way yours looked so I went back out after posting that photo and pruned the lower leaves from mine. It looks a little more "palm like" now.

Hard to believe, the deer at my country house ate all the leaves on the Yuccas! I guess they're good for something (the deer)....