I'm not sure where you live, but here in Knoxville, bagging yard waste is not allowed. In the city limits, folks drag their yard waste to the curb and the city picks it up and makes compost and mulch from it and resales it to the public. The county folks burn it. Of course, I would not recommend you burning poison ivy :). That may be why you cannot find the bags. When I think of yard waste bags, large thick black plastic trash bags come to mind. I think they are called contractor bags.

I compost all my yard waste. Poison Ivy and all!

Rebecca

I have only been in Nashville for about a year but I am sure I saw something like this at Home Depot in the fall for leaves, because I thought why would someone pay for paper bags when you can get them for free from the food store.

I was / am unsure about composting poison ivy. how long would it take to break down the oils, aren't you worried about some of it surviving the process and _getting_ you?

The other thing to consider is that I have enough of this stuff to fill up a dozen or so 33 gallon contractor bags or about 20 of those paper yard bags I've been raving about.

I hadn't really thought about how long to break down in the compost. My DH and I nor my kids are not sensitive to poison ivy, so I usually don't think twice about it. Now my sister, on the other hand, can look at it across the yard and have it in her blood stream and has to go to the ER! It has nearly killed her before when her throat tried to close up from a reaction.

What does "DH" mean? I've seen it several times through various forums on this site and the best I could come up with is "dumb husband" and I'm sure that's not it, lol...

The majority of the time it is "Darling Husband", but fill in the "D" word as you see fit :). I have accidentally said "DH" when referring to hubby in a face to face conversation before. Talk about a strange look! Also, in my case, DH is my husband's initials.

Rebecca

Here is a link that might be useful: Internet Acronyms

Hmm... I think then, for my wife, I shall term her "WIW" for "well intentioned wife"...

<grins,ducks and runs like hell>

No, you're not losing your mind! I know I have seen these at Target and Home Depot. It may have been in the fall for bagging leaves as someone else mentioned.
I live in Nashville and I think leaves are only picked up by the city if they're in those sacks.

I've never seen the paper lawn waste bags either... And it is next to impossible around here to get paper bags from the grocery stores because so many of them have switched to ONLY having the plastic bags. The one store that still has paper available I choose to use every so often just to have the brown paper bags for my husband to set his deep-fried foods on to drain/absorb the excess grease/oil...

Really sucks that you can't order them from Sam's especially when the SC's local to you don't carry them to begin with!

I resorted to clearing out an area way++ in the back and putting the poison oak cuttings back there. The only problem now is that I need to make a good, wooden sign to stake in the ground near it because once the leaves fall off people won't know that the dying sticks and twigs are poisonous and could get into trouble with them.

for what it's worth, now that it's all a moot point, i found some at the target's on Old Hickory near Maryland Farms in Brentwood. <shrug>

Well at least you know where to get them now. And maybe not totally moot - you could always bag up what you piled up way++ back... and I'm sure you will have more poison oak/ivy crop up on you in the future.

lol, no joke on that, there are still several huge "bushes" of it in the back where I wanted to put the kitchen garden. =/

Over the last few years I have become increasingly more sensitive to it... though I think I get nailed more by poison oak than poison ivy. I don't generally actually "get into it", but my sensitivity has increased to the point that I can seemingly pick it up from the molecules on the wind/having been mowed/cut and "floating" and/or secondary contact from one of the canines (assuming they have contact with their fur) or "who knows where" - because while petting a canine would infer that it would "get me" on my hands, I have it crop up in the weirdest places - like places on my body that are covered almost all of the time while having none on my hands. I'm at times baffled by it. But my topical reaction is such at this point in life, that unless I can ID it as honeysuckle or wild grapes or something like that, if it is climbing up a tree I avoid it like the plague and I try to avoid "underbrush" areas. Still, it seems to seek me out. It really sucks though because in youth I could roll in the stuff absolutely unaffected.

I went hunting online for a product for my mom, that would kill "sawbriars" and found an Ortho product that says it does - and also says it kills poison oak, poison ivy, etc. (stuff that regular Round-Up won't "touch")... I haven't tried it yet myself though she bought a bottle of it (pricey - but you can "paint" this stuff on stumps, like freshly cut-down hickory trees, and it will kill them so they don't re-sprout, which they do tend to do - just like sawbriars in their tenacity there)

I'm not kidding about my level of paranoia for anything that even remotely reminds me of poison oak and poison ivy... and I've given up on positive identification anymore - I just need to work up the nerve to go through all five acres in a great attempt to get it all ripped out, poisoned, otherwise killed and made "extinct" from this property. My dad's sensitivity to it heightened through the years, mine happened faster than his, and now one of my kid's sensitivity to it is even "faster re-acting" than mine.

I wonder if I could convince a great group of gardeners to come in for a poison oak & ivy extermination weekend if I cooked for everyone and had things mowed for pitching tents and rented a port-a-potty? Ha! Fat chance, huh?

Saw some at ACE hardware in Dayton. In the house cleaning / chemical area.

Hey hermit, in all honesty, if I could find the time between the new baby - still waiting, she's 3cm dilated at the moment - on the way and the fact that the previous owners of my house didn't take care of their lawn or gardens since the house was built, I'd be there.

Still, I'm not opposed to the idea, even if it's just to put a bunch of markers out next to where you have it growing so that when you do get a group together they know where to hunt.

I'm kind of fascinated with the stuff at the moment, although I'm sure that'll change the next time I get burned by it - managed to get rid of all mine without incident but I was **super** not to damage the plant as I was removing it. Only the bruises on the plant release the oil - and new growth seems to bruise if you sneeze on it, lol.

I wish I had a use for the stuff. I can put up with a lot from a plant if it serves some purpose, but near as I can tell, the wildlife don't even care for the PO/PI here.

I allowed someone to come and cut down trees on the property over the winter and here most recently he finished cutting those downed trees into logs and hauling them off. He kindly put smaller limbs into different piles near to where he did the different cuttings. Now that these larger removals have been attended to there's two things I need to do... 1) mark off anything remotely reminding me of PO/PI for later removal and/or poisoning and 2) mark and ID all of the remaining trees while they actually have leaves to ID from. :)

I should add to that though that I need to do research again and become abundantly more confident in identifying both PO and PI so that my eradication "plan" (for lack of a better word) can take place methodically instead of haphazard... like tackling one smaller area at a time.

Tell your wife that she will be abundantly grateful for the pre-labour dilation once the time comes - gradual over a period of time is so much easier than essentially all at once. I hope (just my personal feelings here) that she will be able to go all-natural/no drugs and you better be there with her THROUGHOUT... if you need ANYTHING, don't hesitate to ask, will do whatever is within our means to help before and after... as small as they are, babies are a big thing. :)

It's our first and so far it looks like everything is happening right on cue. The due date is June 9th but we're thinking it'll be a little sooner - even the doctor said that her belly was "measuring" 39.5 weeks as of last Thursday and when you consider the full moon is only two days away... we shall see.

But boy oh boy does it change you. I find myself waking up every 2-3 hours now but I'm not really tired from it anymore. It's amazing really... Yesterday I broke up the hard, red-clay, rocky root-filled soil in a 30'x15' copse of cedar trees that will be my shade garden. This was all with a pick-axe and after going to bed at 2:00AM I woke up this morning at 6:30 just ready to tear it up some as if I had been resting all month for this day.

This nesting imperative is no joke... ;-p

No poision oak in TN

Poppytart...

I was under the impression that the image below was poison oak. I had sent the image to the webmaster of www.poison-ivy.org asking if it was poison ivy and he said he was pretty certain it was poison oak instead...and I had/have massive amounts of it on my property.

{{gwi:1282627}}{{gwi:1282630}}

I'd be more than happy to be wrong in this case however I'm really curious as to your source and certainty that there is no poison oak in tennessee...

OK I was wrong. I truly thought that poison oak was west coast only, ie west of Mississippi River. Guess I better watch for it more but I truly don't think I've ever seen it in my woods. Lots of PI, grape vine, briar and trumpet vines. Not anything like PO. Aw well, guess I might be wrong again another day.

Don't get me wrong, in this case I'd rather have looked like a dork for cutting down something harmless and mislabeling it than being right, I have loads of the stuff all over my place...

Re: Poison Ivy & Poison Oak...

Poison Ivy is Toxicodendron radicans; the Poison Oak found in the Southeast is Toxicodendron toxicarium. However, it used to be that ivy and oak were considered to be different forms of the exact same species, and some scientists still think so. Basically they only differ in leaf shape. Both occur in Tennessee.

Marty