The Kudzu disaster

Just around the corner from us here in Knoxville, Tennessee is a kudzu vine jungle. The photo gives you a fair idea as to what I mean. The home owners where I took this blip have dug out a ditch like barrier at the edge of their lawns to stop it creeping even closer to the houses.

There’s so much of this fast-growing vine in the Southeastern U.S., you might think it was a native plant. Actually, it took a lot of hard work to help kudzu spread so widely. Now that it covers over seven million acres of the deep South, there are a lot of people working hard to get rid of it! Sort of a USA triffid, I mean plant version of the Aussie cane toad invasion!

Grand scale disaster

Kudzu’s History:
Kudzu, a member of the pea family, was introduced to the United States in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Japanese government constructed a beautiful garden filled with plants from their country. The large leaves and sweet-smelling blooms of kudzu captured the imagination of American gardeners who used the plant for ornamental purposes.

Florida nursery operators discovered that animals would eat the plant and promoted its use for forage in the 1920s. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Soil Conservation Service promoted kudzu for erosion control. It was used in the dust bowl to help stabilise the soil from being blown away.

Hundreds of young men were given work planting kudzu through the Civilian Conservation Corps. Farmers were paid as much as eight dollars an acre as incentive to plant fields of the vines in the 1940s. During the 1940s it was called “the miracle vine.”

The problem is that it just grows too well! The climate of the Southeastern U.S. is perfect for kudzu. The vines grow as much as a foot per day during summer months, climbing trees, power poles, and anything else they contact. Under ideal conditions kudzu vines can grow sixty feet each year.

While they help prevent erosion, the vines can also destroy valuable forests by preventing trees from getting sunlight. After eighteen years of research, it was found that one herbicide actually makes kudzu grow better while many have little effect.

Miller recommends repeated herbicide treatments for at least four years, but some kudzu plants may take as long as ten years to kill, even with the most effective herbicides. Any suggestions fellow blippers?!

See Paladian's blip of the flower from this vine.