Plauntie, do you have any advice on murdering the hell out of Tree of Heaven? Zone 6a if it matters. Somone planted the damn Ailanthus before we got the house, and it sends out tons of sucker saplings. I've tried weed block fabric, yanking them up and mowing them down. The plants reek like hell and grow back like crazy. I need to kill them all, because I found out last year that my skin reacts to Tree of Heaven like it's a bad case of poison ivy. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Goddamn that tree is fuckin just, the toughest motherfucker of a tree around.
And the answer is literally “salt the earth”
We had a couple trying to grow in our yard, and I literally bought a bulk container of regular ol’ sea salt and dumped it around the trunk, then watered it in with vinegar, and sprayed extra vinegar over the leaves. I kept doing this oh, once a week until the motherfuckers died.
The salt will leach out of the soil in a few good rains.
Now, I’d not use this for most weeds, because it’s not great for a ton of salt to end up in waterways. I only use it on rare occasions for the most stubborn. Most of the time, spraying with vinegar a couple times will do it. But if you really need something fucking dead and it’s as stubborn as alianthus, it will work and it’s more friendly than most herbicides. The salt will eventually make its way back to the sea.
