I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
We're talking about killing Russian olive trees and so I'd like to discuss a
little bit about the chemical we use and our application method. Some of the
chemicals that that are labeled for stump - cut stump type treatment would be
just as effective. We found with Russian olive that glyphosate products: Roundup
or Killzall - High Yields Killzall - there's a number of products that have
the glyphosate in them and that's what we've used it's been very very effective.
The aquatic label has been just as good as the non-aquatic label so we have been
very successful year round using glyphosate products to kill Russian
olives. I'm sure that the Garlon and some of those others - we're doing some other
trials on those - we're...we're testing those to see if they're just as
effective, but we've had year round kill using 41% undiluted glyphosate in the...to
treat the stumps. Now our application method is a little bit unique: we use a
livestock dosage syringe; just set it to one milliliter per click and that way I
can tell exactly how much I'm putting on. It doesn't take very long to do it that
way; some people like to do the little spray bottle thing but the accuracy
isn't probably there, you're not sure how much you're putting on, so we put down
our chemical with livestock syringe. So if we've got a four inch tree stump
I'll put four milliliters of chemical around the cambium rings - the outside sap
rings - of the tree; there's no point in treating in the middle. So we'll come in
close and take a look and show how the application method works with using the
livestock syringe. All right so we see here we've got this tree we just cut
down; the growth - the food coming from the leaves down to the roots come
down through this layer and the water coming from the roots up to the leaves
comes through the xylem tissue - so you got the phloem and xylem tissue. The
active phloem and xylem tissue is just around the outside of the tree; these
inside rings here...is basically dead wood. So they're not going to translocate any
of the chemical down to the roots where we need to kill -
got to kill the roots in order to kill the tree. So we just take the syringe, and
probably best is if you got a little bit of a high spot, you start up here and it
will flow down a little bit. You just treat it down, and if you have several
stems you need to treat each stem, and I just for the purposes of making sure I
get a good kill. So that's...that's about two milliliters there, we got about a
three and a half inch, four inch stump here, so I'll put a little bit on that.
That soaks in really quick. We'll go to each one of these multiple stems and
treat each one so that they all get a good treatment. If you don't treat every
stem you're very likely going to have - and we've got all these little ones and so
I'll just add a little bit on each one of those - otherwise we would have, very
likely have, some suckers come up that we don't want; we only want to have to do
it once. Now these that are kind of got left we can do kind of a base of bark
treatment, but you need to get that onto those just like you do all the others. So
that's really is the application method, it's really quite simple, and it
goes fairly fast. You just have to kind of keep up with the the sawers and the
swampers and everything, so you've got two or three man crew they can do the
sawing and the swamping. Otherwise you can high stump them and then come back a
day later, cut them and treat them; we've been doing some research on that and it
seems to be just as effective as if you were to cut it and treat it quickly. So
when we talk about high stumping, we...we're basically just going to cut up higher
and that will allow us then to come back and make another cut down low. So we've
got to get through all this brush to get to the trunk, then we can make another
quick cut down low and get everything cut off, and then we can treat down low.
The other option, we're still doing some trials to research whether or not how
effective it is to treat the high stump and kill it this way; if you do that,
again, you have to treat each one of those stumps so there's a
lot more that you have to do. But this is an option that may work in a fence line
where you can't get down because you got the wire in the way, you may be able to
cut off at the top of the tree. We're still - the jury still out on how
effective that is at this point, but now we can come through and cut that down
low and treat the stump; so this is what's called high stumping.