Radio Show: Good vines and bad vines

This week's radio show was a continuation of the newspaper column about a thorny, invasive vine that is one of the varieties of Smilax. We talked about good vines for your garden and ones you should avoid.

Thorny Smilax vine nothing to smile about

By Audrey Post
MS. GROW-IT-ALL

Q: I have an invasive vine in my yard that is very thorny. It has long runners and breaks when I pull it up by hand. How can I get rid of this thing?

A: From your description, it sounds like smilax, a nasty customer indeed. Also known as catbrier, deer thorn and blaspheme vine (very appropriate!), it has a long tap root with small bulbs that form around it, so pulling it up really doesn’t work. Some types of smilax have heart-shaped leaves, while others have elongated narrow leaves.

If you can catch it in early spring, your best bet is to dig it out. Make sure you get the entire mass of roots. Gloves are must because once it has sprouted, those thorns are wicked. Smilax particularly likes azalea bushes, so prune them once they’ve finished blooming so you can get under the branches to dig out the smilax root.

You can spray smilax with a weed killer for brush and woody vines, but chemicals tend to run off instead of soaking in because the leaves are glossy. Plus, it’s too easy to hit nearby plants with the spray. I have used a small foam paint brush to “paint” the leaves with herbicide, which knocks it back for a couple of months but doesn’t kill it. Another one of those bulbs simply takes over. I suppose if I kept at it at regular intervals, I might eventually kill the thing.

Walter Reeves, host of the Gardening in Georgia show on Georgia Public Television, suggests the following method:

Using Roundup concentrate, make up three gallons of solution following label directions in a five-gallon plastic bucket. Lift the long vines off your shrubbery, flowers and wherever else they have deposited themselves and drape them into the bucket. Let each vine soak about 15 minutes, so it can soak up as much poison as possible. Be careful when you lift out the vines that you don’t sling poison on nearby plants. Lay the soaked vines on the ground and let them dry.

You can strain the trash out of the leftover Roundup in the bucket and reuse it. Take an old strainer, line it with a coffee filter and pour the solution into a pump sprayer.