Basal bark treatment of woodies and brambles

We are working hard right now to do basal bark treatment of woody shrubs and brambles on areas that we plan to burn soon. Since the burns top-kill these shrubs, we must get the treatment in before the burns.

We spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out what is the best way of doing basal bark treatment. A lot depends on the size of the shrubs. For large shrubs, such as "old-growth" honeysuckle or buckthorn, the use of a backpack sprayer is the best. However, most of our shrubs are fairly small, arising from regrowth from a seed bank. Spraying with the backpack is wasteful of herbicide, and it is difficult to confine the spray just to the target stems.


My own preference is to use a hand-operated spray bottle, which permits quite accurate placement of herbicide, as the photo shows. However, if the site is flat this involves a fair bit of stooping. But on road cuts or slopes, such as we have quite a bit of here in the Driftless Area, stooping is minimal.

Yesterday afternoon Susan and I treated the woody plants on the road cut above the Valley Prairie. When we planted the Valley Prairie in 2002, this road cut had been heavily wooded, since it escaped the plow. A contractor cleared it in the summer/fall of 2002, removing many large buckthorns and honeysuckles (both dripping with berries!), as well as a large number of elm, cherry, and walnut trees. The undesirable seed bank was confined mostly to the road cut, and about six feet below on the level. Although we planted the road cut, understandably it did not "take" very well, and we have been battling woody vegetation ever since. The first few years we spent a lot of time with brush cutters.

Gradually, prairie got established on the road cut, which now burns fairly well, thus helping to control the brush. But we still get new shrub growth each year, plus lots of brambles.

The principal brambles are black raspberry, which tends to sprawl out over the ground. There are also some dense clones of red raspberry, which are a pain to work on. And there are even the occasional blackberry, which is the easiest to basal bark.

Our basal bark mixture is 4 parts of Bark Oil LT, 1 part of Garlon 4 (or Element 4, its equivalent), and a healthy dollop of Bas-Oil Red dye. I find that if I grab upright stems with my left hand and pull back, I can direct the spray to the base of the stem and have little waste. With the small stems we are dealing with, it is not necessary to spray both sides of the stem.