Botanical Beast Kudzu A Force To Be Reckoned At U.S. Army Posts

AP/Boston Globe ^ | 8/23/2002 | Bill Baskervill

[iav2]

FORT PICKETT, Va. (AP) In little more than 100 years in the United States, kudzu has marched across farm fields, shoved aside native plants and disrupted ecosystems with its smothering blanket of green leaves.

Now, the nearly indestructible vine is taking on the Army.

[RightWhale]

Forest Service scientists are already in China surveying kudzu's natural enemies.

Import the entire ecosystem or nothing. Remember Australia!

[KarlInOhio]

Then, in the 1930s, the Agriculture Department decided kudzu could be used for erosion control and distributed 85 million kudzu seedlings in the South. It was later discovered that kudzu's erosion control properties were limited because its vines grow horizontally and slightly above ground, branching out as much as 2 feet a day.

The difference between the government using kudzu for erosion control and most government programs is that it stopped pouring money into increasing the program. If it had worked the same as most programs, they would be planting billions of more seedlings since the first 85 million didn't work right.

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

Hah! Wait till the bamboo gets there. That stuff is a serious plague. I've often wondered which of the two would survive an ancounter with the other. They'd probably have some crazy symbiotic relationship.

[kayak]

I traveled last weekend through part of the drought-stricken East ..... even the kudzu seemed to be stressed from the lack of water.

[veronica]

News of that persistent pest, the dreaded kudzu. LOL.

[kayak]

Oops! The picture showed up on preview ..... I don't know what happened.

[xJones]

Let's hear for the amazing kudzu! Growing Kudzu.

Excerpt: "Contrary to what may be told by the Extension Service, kudzu can profit from a good mulch. I have found that a heavy mulch for the young plants produces a hardier crop. For best results, as soon as the young shoots begin to appear, cover kudzu with concrete blocks. Although this causes a temporary setback, your kudzu will accept this mulch as a challenge and will reward you with redoubled determination in the long run."

LOL, we'll never get rid of it.

[EggsAckley]

Thanks for the "gardening tips". LOL.

[SJackson]

Note, Georgia. A McKinney connection?

                                                             

Kudzu

Japan invades. Far Eastern vines
Run from the clay banks they are

Supposed to keep from eroding.
Up telephone poles,
Which rear, half out of leafage
As though they would shriek,
Like things smothered by their own
Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts.
In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows

At night to keep it out of the house.
The glass is tinged with green, even so,

As the tendrils crawl over the fields.
The night the kudzu has
Your pasture, you sleep like the dead.
Silence has grown Oriental
And you cannot step upon ground:
Your leg plunges somewhere
It should not, it never should be,
Disappears, and waits to be struck

Anywhere between sole and kneecap:
For when the kudzu comes,

The snakes do, and weave themselves
Among its lengthening vines,
Their spade heads resting on leaves,
Growing also, in earthly power
And the huge circumstance of concealment.
One by one the cows stumble in,
Drooling a hot green froth,
And die, seeing the wood of their stalls

Strain to break into leaf.
In your closed house, with the vine

Tapping your window like lightning,
You remember what tactics to use.
In the wrong yellow fog-light of dawn
You herd them in, the hogs,
Head down in their hairy fat,
The meaty troops, to the pasture.
The leaves of the kudzu quake
With the serpents' fear, inside

The meadow ringed with men
Holding sticks, on the country roads.

The hogs disappear in the leaves.
The sound is intense, subhuman,
Nearly human with purposive rage.
There is no terror
Sound from the snakes.
No one can see the desperate, futile
Striking under the leaf heads.
Now and then, the flash of a long

Living vine, a cold belly,
Leaps up, torn apart, then falls

Under the tussling surface.
You have won, and wait for frost,
When, at the merest touch
Of cold, the kudzu turns
Black, withers inward and dies,
Leaving a mass of brown strings
Like the wires of a gigantic switchboard.
You open your windows,

With the lightning restored to the sky
And no leaves rising to bury

You alive inside your frail house,
And you think, in the opened cold,
Of the surface of things and its terrors,
And of the mistaken, mortal
Arrogance of the snakes
As the vines, growing insanely, sent
Great powers into their bodies
And the freedom to strike without warning:

From them, though they killed
Your cattle, such energy also flowed

To you from the knee-high meadow
(It was as though you had
A green sword twined among
The veins of your growing right arm--
Such strength as you would not believe
If you stood alone in a proper
Shaved field among your safe cows--):
Came in through your closed

Leafy windows and almighty sleep
And prospered, till rooted out.

 James Dickey

[Cachelot]

News of that persistent pest, the dreaded kudzu. LOL.

Who you gonna call?

[Private Joker]

Old joke in Alabama: How do you plant kudzu?

Answer: Drop it and run like hell.

[Frohickey]

Wait.

Why aren't they training in kudzu fields? That will just be better training for when our guys do it for real... in China!

[killjoy]

Wait till the bamboo gets there. That stuff is a serious plague.

Why do you have such a hatred for bamboo? There are two major 'types' of bamboo. Running and clumping. Most of the bamboo in the US is of the clumping variety. This includes the bamboo normally sold at commercial growers. Clumping bamboo is easily controllable since, as the name implies, grows by increasing the diameter of the grove. It can be controlled by simply cutting the new shoots as they show up around the perimeter of the grove. No different that pruning a tree.

Running bamboo sends out 'runners' away from the plant which pop out of the ground at different distances from the plant It can be a problem depending on species, but it is not commonly sold. Most of the people growing it and/or selling it know how to control it. It's spreading can easily be stopped through barriers which restrict the travel of the roots. Shoots that pop up can also easily be killed by simply cutting them.

Based off the Kudzu article, they are completely different animals.

[ArrogantBustard]

Bamboo can get out of control. Kudzu is out of control. Kudzu is bad medicine; it overwhelms everything in its path. Furtunately, Roundup^TM kills the stuff, but you have to see it as WAR.

[TADSLOS]

Whole sections of Fort Benning are covered with the stuff.

[cva66snipe]

Sounds like they need to get some Nubians. They make good maintainers of underbrush. Using goats to difficult to reach terrain and heavy undergrowth is being used in many places. The browse alone will keep them fed all year.

[OldPossum]

I remember seeing this stuff as a kid. I swear that if you watched it long enough you could see the darned stuff grow.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Would it be a violation of the Geneva Protocols to drop kudzu shoots on Iraqi military bases?

[headsonpikes]

Bump your post and append this thought:

If the gubmint were to stop funding madcap socialist experiments, all the fun would go out of legislating.