How I Eradicated Poison Oak Without Spraying or Goats 

Here is a tip to remove poison oak. Fill a garden sprayer with a water maple syrup mix and spray on plants. The deer will eat it right up. This also works for helping to build trails.

Because you do have a great sense of humor, it appears you had an old goat get rid of the poison oak along with some help from the local deer.

Having spent the last 18 years fighting wildfires in CA, I have to say I wish everyone watched your videos and had the same work ethic. 1. I HATE oak. 2. A little fire prevention goes along way! Awesome video.

You may be the only youtuber I have encountered who can do the sponsorships talks without it getting annoying, keep it up.

Here in the Great Smokies, I havent seen any poison oak. But the poison ivy grows EVERYWHERE. I get a bad rash just looking at it. Have you ever visited Appalachia? All the cool kids are visiting here. You could bring that snazzy string trimmer with you. I would even let you sleep in my cool log barn! (because you arent coming in the house with that mess all over your clothes)

I had 10 acres infested with poison oak that was fenced for cattle, but I needed it for sow (mother pigs) pasture so I put insulators on one of the wires so I could electrify it. When I turned the sows in the field they discovered that poison oak and thought it was dessert. They ate the easy stuff first, then what they could get at up the trees, and lastly rooted up the roots. When they were done there was none left with very little effort on my part.

My lower back is hurting just watching you use that string trimmer on such a large area!

This technique is the same when trying to eradicate bamboo. You wait for the plant to spend its energy creating new growth, then you cut it all down before it has time to store energy in its rhizome/roots. After a few years it's gone. Great piece of knowledge, thanks for sharing!

as a landscaper, thats not mowing, thats scalping. do what must be done.🍻

I got goats specifically to get rid of a ton of poison oak and they won't touch the stuff. They eat the ground, trees, and tree bark barren and the poison oak just looks lively as ever.

You gotta love this guy, how could you not. To the point of this video……BRAVO!

I've found that poison oak roots are shallow so the plant can be easily uprooted--as long as you're not terribly allergic to it and you're wearing gloves and long sleeves.

As a Marine I really appreciate that you left no survivors while wacking those evil poison oaks off.

Thanks to the inventor of the gas-powered string trimmer... Only digging by hand before...

In 2010 I bought property that had a 20 year growth of poison oak in the back half. It was only an acre but leaves were 5 inches in diameter with 2 inch stalks and vines growing up into some of the oak trees. (About 18 good sized oaks in my woods.) I tried Roundup. It laughed at me. After about two years of battling with chemistry, I took my pole saw and cut every stalk I could see right at ground level. The stuff was 90 percent dead after two days. Where I could reach it, I dabbed straight Roundup concentrate on the stumps, because as you know, it tends to spread underground. The next year, I cleared all the dried brush and the applied weed whacker technology just as you did. After a couple years, it was pretty much gone. It tries to resurface now and then but annual weed clearing and weed abatement ordinances keep my property usable by both me and the deer…😎

I truly enjoy your videos. We have a problem with poison oak all around the flat where our home is located. I am going to follow your methods on eradicating that garbage. Our grandkids run all around the flat and usually one or both with get it. I have a friend that tried to burn it and he got it pretty bad from inhaling the smoke. Thank you for sharing your vast amount of knowledge.

"I'm not even wearing those socks." ~ sensible chuckle

"... use peer pressure if you have to." Its things like that, that makes me watch your videos. Thanks for all the content😂

I watched your video about fires recently, I have little reason to be interested in this but I find your style, editing, and voice so appealing here I am.

Having tried other methods with less success I'm going try it your way. This makes more sense than what I was doing anyway. Liked and subbed!

Bookmarking that website for when I need to buy some more socks. Much appreciated 👍

If the super close cut of the weed whacked works best for the poison oak I would probably just do that in the areas with poison oak and simply now with a mower the older areas that you have eliminated the poison oak from. That's a lot of work!

Whoa! The cut to the saw, look at that mound of organic material! Spread'r around!

Thanks!

Nice airborne urishiol.

You might want an autonomous robotic forestry mulcher coming soon to a neighborhood near you

I was waiting for you to whip out some TechNu at the end. Nice to see the poison oak not climbing up any of your trees either. Great piece of upper oak woodland, very defensible space as well. Thanks!

I now use one of those N95 mask when i mow or weed eat. Helps a bunch with the dust.

the word is variable ! I keep getting nailed from the vines in the ground the leaves don’t bother me so much. Love your property

Who wouldn’t want goats? Goats are awesome!

I can’t weed whack like that anymore, but I do know that this technique is valid. I spot apply ground clear and brush mow now.

we also do this for invasive leafy spurge

Enjoyed from Texas!

I need a solution for poison ivy, but not a trimmer since I would turn into a giant bubble and die. Also a trimmer wont deal with the bigger vines (i have had up to 6 inches here, but i think I killed that plant)

An enclosed respirator should be used to protect the worker during this process. A string trimmer will blast the toxic oils from the poison oak into the air as it's trimmed. Those oils can irritate and damage lung and eye tissue. Protective clothing should be worn too. Touching clothing that has the toxic oil on it can easily spread the oil onto a person's skin. Any tools used to eradicate poison oak should be cleaned thoroughly before reuse.

04:30 min - 😂🤣😂 this joke made my day... deers at the sawmill...

I use the product called Soothes-It, the pure juice of the Comfort Plant- it's an amazing antidote to poison oak rash.

200 sq ft down, 180 acres 😊to go.

Had my skin start itching and crawling !

I’m totally jealous of your backyard!

I found that “sucker” to weedwhip my poison oak. He said he never got it and didn’t get it, I told him to cover up just in case. He proceeded to weedwhip in a t-shirt and sunglasses. Two days later he was covered in PO rash😂

Had a job with a wealthy man who brought a property next door that had a large pond/ small lake that he wanted to turn in to a park. The property was over grown and poison oak has a couple decade headstart and had climbed into all the hardwood trees and had a parasitic relationship with said trees . The poison oak., being a vine would climb up the hardwoods and use their structure to support the leaves and seeds of the poison oak . Because they didn't need to invest as much of their energy into roots and wood they could easily overwhelm the canopy with their vines and leaves the tree underneath would suffer the lack of sunlight and start to die off. In order to stop this process and save the tree it's as simple as cutting through the stem of the poison oak which can be as fat as 4-5". The poison oak will die but you are left with a half dead tree with a huge heavy poison oak vine threaded through the poor host tree. My theory for best restoration method was cutting through the stem a year before. Let it die and dry out. Try to remove the vines before the tree recovered too much which made the dry vine removal very difficult. He would rent a chipper, hire day labor from home depot and get me and my swiss friend to run the crew and make sure no one got too hurt. It was almost hysterical if it wasn't so pathetic. Lot's of stories from those weeks of brush clearing but back to my point. The poison oak oil that was sprayed back from the chainsaw would cover our clothes with black spots. These spots wouldn't wash out. Nor would the poisonous syrup cease to cause havoc with skin underneath no matter how many times you washed it. Pretty much you had to dedicate clothes for this level of poison oak removal. And don't make the mistake of washing other clothes with these clothes. Quite possible i ruined some washing machines as well. Sorry!

Tyvek suits are pretty cheap and can be tossed after your done. Also yellow jackets can't sting through them.

Always entertaining and informative

Congrats on the success with killing the evil poison oak! Wish I still had any form of turbo mode but sadly any more I only got slow and super slow. Also glad we are on the west side of the cascades so we have almost no poison oak to deal with downside is no shortage of sting nettles. Totally understand about uncooperative wildlife it is like they know when you want them and go into hiding

Wonderfully informative. Thanks.

You're going to weedwack the entire area???? Ma Ma Mia!!!

Sheep work the best for us! No more oak on our 10 acres! It took three years and sheep are so easy!

Looks alot like my southern OR back yard - including the deer. Appreciate the info. What brand & model is that weedwhacker, looks like it really runs well.

I have tons of poison oak. The idea of cutting it with a line trimmer seems crazy. Cutting normal weeds leaves me covered in debris. Wont I be covered in bits of poison oak too? Sounds like a disaster!

back in the 50's, we used to spray it with fuel oil. Gone!

We don't have poison oak here,just poison ivy. The great thing about poison ivy is if it's in your yard, all you have to do is mow it down each grass mowing you do. Doing that all spring and summer (except in dry season when it doesn't grow much anyway) kills it out by the fall. Fortunately I'm not super sensitive to it, so mowing it wasn't a problem.

Even if your not allergic sweating makes everyone prone or breathing the dust your scewed.

Your ad caused me to subscribe 😆

In areas where the poison oak is thinner, is it worth only trimming patches where the plants are? Especially if you’re not worried about defensible space and having patchy grass?

I just dig it up by tha root👏🏽😂🤣

good job

Wear a full cover suit. Do not weed whack poison oak unless you want to spray the oil everywhere

What model Stihl are you using here? String or metal?

String trimmer out for me, with my luck , it would splatter poison ivy juice onto to me ! no. I have a wooded area where it would be tough to use. If I had that type area you were doing, I would the lower deck and use my riding lawn mower.

I'll keep the goats. Mowing 20 acres with a weedeater is nuttier than squirrel poop. Just like all these people with 10 acres of yard they mow once a week just to look at. Doesn't make a lick of sense to me to use good pasture & hay ground for wasting time and fuel.

deer are like goats with lower maintenance. as for the technique, my dad refers to it as "denial of green" if you don't let the weed have any green, it will eventually give up and die.

;-)) the ending

No no, i´ll stay with chemical. Watching you spreading sap, oily particles and fine vegetation particles everywhere, i start scratching. May be you´re not allergic to it. Thanks for the tric.

How about hiring somebody with a bunch of goats and let them be responsible after the grass is gone they come and pick them up. Makes sense to me.

if you wash within 8 hours or so you wont get a rash. however a dust mask may be a good idea

You couldn’t pay me enough to do that. I weed whacked some poison oak once and even though I was covered from head to toe with clothes, I still suffered from that awful rash literally all over my body. I get it so bad…

Good luck PO says I will be back haha

Anybody have a similar technique for invasive blackberries?

Does this work with poison ivy as well?

A pretty susceptible person would likely get a good coating of oils from mowing like that, but very interesting concept of killing PO

what brand line trimmer is that

And, how are you not getting covered in poison oak?

id get a cheaper used mower and drop the deck super low. you can get it down to the dirt and not blow out your back and shoulders

never seen deer running a sawmill before......

Poison Oak is an important browse, meaning nutritional food source, for deer, and elk. So are Black Berry bushes and more. Your open understory tells the truth about how you feel about the animals who inhabit your forest land… or don’t. I get it that you have to take care of your bottom line, and that is wonderful, however, foresters typically ignore creating “habitat Islands” which feed the local creatures in lieu of planting ONE MORE TREE. There has to be a happy medium.

I did the same thing with the Sage brush i had here on my property. Waited till july and August and cut them, and they just dried up and died.😉👍

the problem with goatsis the seeds pass through there sysyem and out the poop.

Guessing you not bothered breathing in any of the poison oak dust/fibers from whacking.

Diesel fuel in a Hudson sprayer takes care of it

Does the old goat (wife) work?

If i tried or weed eating that stuff id be layed up for a week or more when i was a kid i could play in poison oak all day and not have an issue now i get with in 10 ft and i break out in rash every where

You don't need goats when you already have their relatives laying around the mill. I have same problem 5 under the trees by mine. Listen to people talk they are hard to hunt you have to be sneaky yet anytime of day I have several watching what I am doing

Dig something with a flail mower

But,why?why do you need to eradicate it? Pollinators love it,great erosion control,good hiding places for animals....among other things.taking all that vegetation down to bare ground seems like a surefire recipe for erosion to me....but I guess you really like the golf course look...

It looks like the poison oak has been replaced by the Western Black-Legged Tick.

i caught poison oak just watching this video

skip the flowers that are in bloom while you weed wack and allow them to go to seed too.

Hogs instead of goats? Ventrac ( expensive ) for the turbo mode areas?

youcan get poison oak reaction in yourlungs - be warned

Take a bath Manzanita leaves

Those trees wont grow into good timber unless you plant more trees and push them to grow tall to reach sunlight

Cutting poison oak with a weed eater or even a mower is extremely dangerous for anybody. So...?

This is the same way you deal with invasive bamboo.

How do you kill it with out killing everything else

scythe mowing would work and not spray poison oak material all over you.

"Hardly any" is not eradicated.

you sound like the " wild kingdom " guy. he was also a boring bastard. It was Marlin Perkins who croaked in 1986.

So I’m stuck using chemicals.

Flail mower.