Related:
Kudzu, the vine that never ate the south (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35934578 - May 2023 (47 comments)
Kudzu, the vine that never truly ate the South (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668829 - June 2020 (40 comments)
The Secret Life of Kudzu - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20593633 - Aug 2019 (9 comments)
The Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Never Truly Ate the South - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10113294 - Aug 2015 (18 comments)
A while ago someone posted an article about stacking and freezing farmed biomass. They wanted to sequester CO2 from whatever random stuff that could be farmed cheap and frozen in the winter by hosing it down and running pipes through it then opening or closing the pipes to make it either match the air temp or resist temperature change.
Large swaths of the south simply don't have winter. But how cold does it get and how far from wintery areas is it? Is trucking a bunch of kudzu an option?
Unless your truck is using a carbon-neutral power source, then no it's not an option. You'll emit more carbon than you sequester.
I have a constant battle with Kudzu every year. I wish we could find an easier way to kill the stuff, or transform it into something else.
That being said, goats will dig down and eat the hell out of the stuff.
Goats sounds like a good idea. And once they eat all the kudzu, you can eat the goats.
It's edible if you want to go through the trouble. It's a variety of arrowroot which has a lot of uses in east asian food traditions. I like the tea.
Unless you get them very young, eating the leaves is reminiscent of chewing sandpaper. Now you have me wondering if it would be palatable juiced, maybe as part of a smoothie.
Yeah I've only ever eaten the young shoots. It was fine I never went out of my way to eat it again though.
And often used as a digestive aid/folk-medicine
Doesn't this just mean it will give you the shits?
Doesn't Roundup control it effectively?
I have English ivy around my house, which isn't quite as invasive as kudzu, but still a major nuisance.
Roundup does basically nothing. The leaves are thick and waxy and so don't absorb herbicide effectively. Supposedly, applying a more concentrated formula on a weekly basis for a month can work, but I don't like the idea of spraying that much glyphosate.
If you have to use poison you can use way less by pruning and putting a dab of glyphosate on the stump. Even dishsoap straight to the vascular system will kill many plants.
My husband swears by painting the leaves with the herbicide. Time consuming, though.
no, not at all
I used to live in Maryland, and saw Kudzu do some impressive work. Acres of land are covered by one patch.
I now live in New York, and it's starting to show up here.
Fun times ahead...
I think the point of the article is that Kudzu isn't really a threat and hasn't taken over nearly as much as people perceive.
Numbers wise, sure, there are certainly more invasive species out there.
The trick with Kudzu is that, unlike ligustrum sinense, it invades in a much more literal sense, covering both other plants and the ground itself as far as it can. It 'universally' impedes the growth of other plants, and arguably makes terrain less traversal (if only because it covers what's underneath).
It may not be an ecological danger, but it can be a pain. Yes, other vines can grow as quickly, but most of them have smaller leaves and less propensity to carpet entire areas. I think the visual impact may make it feel more impactful and lend to its mythologization.
I saw it do some impressive stuff. These articles pop up, from time to time, but you need to see it in action.
it's most likely you saw this from a road, where humans have disturbed the forest and introduced more sunlight, which is where kudzu thrives. not all land is visible from the road.
We used to play in it, when I was a kid, and that was before it really started to dominate. Back then, it was in fairly discrete patches, like what is heppening in New York, now.
At some time, in the last 30 years, it exploded.
Driving through dead forests covered in this vine on my way to PA from TX, I would respectfully disagree with their premise. When allowed to proliferate it strangled everything visible from the highway, and covered every inch of the hundreds of standing dead wood trees it had killed.
> everything visible from the highway,
But isn't this exactly what the article is arguing?
> As trees grew in the cleared lands near roadsides, kudzu rose with them. It appeared not to stop because there were no grazers to eat it back. But, in fact, it rarely penetrates deeply into a forest; it climbs well only in sunny areas on the forest edge and suffers in shade.
> Still, along Southern roads, the blankets of untouched kudzu create famous spectacles.
It's kind of ignoring the fact that as development proceeds, the ratio of "greenery within 100 yards of a road" to "forest" grows rapidly.
> And that, perhaps, is the real danger of kudzu. Our obsession with the vine hides the South. It veils more serious threats to the countryside, like suburban sprawl, or more destructive invasive plants such as the dense and aggressive cogon grass and the shrubby privet. More important, it obscures the beauty of the South’s original landscape, reducing its rich diversity to a simplistic metaphor.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only person that's read a given article... Though I guess I actually read it last time it was posted.
Did it kill the trees, or did it proliferate after the trees died (and increased the direct sunlight reaching the ground)?
In my calculus class in high school, one of the problems in the set at the end of the chapter about the rate of the growth of kudzu. None of us had heard of it (including the teacher), which I guess might be due to being in New England rather than somewhere it's more of a problem. I think I remember us thinking it was some sort of crop rather than a weed, so we were all very surprised at the super high rate of growth it used in the problem.
Does higher CO2 make it grow faster?
Not likely in any appreciable way like the conspiracy theorists are putting forward.
I bet if you had lab controlled environments you could find some optimal level of CO2 for it to grow in if you could guarantee no pests or competitors. But those detractors will change with CO2 levels too. Also, beneficial things for the plant in question will change too, like other plants that fix soil nutrients and polinators. It is simply too complex of a question to truly know and tiny changes in a superficially positive direction could have wildly unexpected negative impacts from an unmodeled directions.
So... I don't know and I doubt anyone does unless they have studied the whole ecosystem for a long time.
A 30% change in my lifetime (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...) is neither a conspiracy theory nor tiny.
But you're right in the sense that this is utterly unprecedented in our history, so we don't rightfully know how the ecosystem will react as a whole.
It autodetected hardware well under a red hat...