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What is up with this leafy vine covering everything at the sides of the roads and many wooded areas. I see it covering all the trees, bushes, utility poles, road signs, and wires. It looks like it takes over everything wherever it grows. What is it? Is it a native plant?
What is up with this leafy vine covering everything at the sides of the roads and many wooded areas. I see it covering all the trees, bushes, utility poles, road signs, and wires. It looks like it takes over everything wherever it grows. What is it? Is it a native plant?
Kudzu
http://www.yahoolavista.com/kudzu/ (broken link)
If you are ever at the Peach Stand in Fort Mill, SC they carry a Kudzu Jelly (nope I have not tried it...and don't plan to)
It doesn't really, but it does kill them. They have at least one major story on kudzu and how it can destroy livestock and crops every year. It is sort of "pretty" though, you would think it was part of landscaping sometimes.
It's the scourge of the south. It was brought over from Japan as a decorative vine...but instead, here it has become the very definition of a weed. It is extremely difficult to get rid of it. I think it's even illegal to purposely plant it.
Which, personally, I think should also be the case for wisteria and English ivy.
Kudzu was introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and an ornamental plant. From 1935 to the early 1950s the Soil Conservation Service encouraged farmers in the South to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps planted it widely for many years. Kudzu was recognized as a pest weed by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1953, and was removed from its list of permissible cover plants.
Kudzu is now common throughout most of the southeastern United States, and has been found as far north as Pennsylvania, and as far south as northern Florida. It has also been found growing (rather inexplicably) in Clackamas County, Oregon in 2000. In all, kudzu infests 20,000 to 30,000 square kilometres of land in the United States and costs around $500 million annually in lost cropland and control costs. It cannot tolerate extremely low freezing temperatures that bring the frost line down through its entire root system; however it does require some cold weather (a solid frost or freeze annually).
Kudzu is also becoming a problem in northeastern Australia.
Kudzu vines can make walking across an area nearly impossible, as it takes over all horizontal and vertical surfaces, both natural and manmade. Its dense growth obstructs all views and movement into the area. It kills or degrades other plants by smothering them under a solid blanket of leaves, by girdling woody stems and tree trunks, and by breaking branches or uprooting entire trees and shrubs through its weight.
The spread of kudzu is mainly by vegetative expansion by runners and rhizomes and by vines that root at the nodes to form new plants. Kudzu will also spread by seeds, which are contained in pods and mature in the autumn. One or two viable seeds are produced per cluster of pods. These hard-coated seeds may not germinate for several years, which can result in the re-appearance of the species years after it was thought eradicated at a site.
And I thought you all were just kidding. It looks like it could smother me!
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LOL, Too funny
