How does kudzu grow

For more ways to control kudzu, check out Dr. James H. Miller's Kudzu Eradication and Management paper. The best way to fight invasive species is to prevent them from occurring in the first place.

Instructional Material. Though its name makes it sound heavenly, the invasive tree of heaven is no angel. Learn all about this devilish invader. Wild garlic mustard is a highly destructive invasive species in the United States, but anyone can help stop its spread. Back To Top. Stories in Indiana Kudzu: The Invasive Vine that Ate the South Kudzu looks innocent enough yet the invasive plant easily overtakes trees, abandoned homes and telephone poles.

After 3 years, produces purple or red flowers Edible? Kudzu leaves, flowers and roots can be eaten. The root should be cooked. The carbohydrates stored in this root system allow kudzu to withstand and recover quickly after drought, freezing temperatures and burning. Herbicides are effective on small, immature patches of kudzu, but larger infestations require repeated applications over extended periods of time, which can be very expensive. The USDA is currently investigating a bioherbicide containing the fungal pathogen Myrothecium verrucaria , and initial trials with kudzu are promising.

Targeted grazing by livestock, including cattle, goats , sheep and pigs, is also effective. In eastern Asia, there is a long history of using kudzu for food, fiber and medicine. Leaves, tender shoots and flowers are eaten raw and cooked. Starch derived from the roots is used as a thickening agent, to coat foods before frying, and in noodles and desserts.

The dried root has been used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine to treat a variety of maladies, including digestive disorders, diabetes, colds, fevers, headaches, cardiovascular problems, alcoholism and the symptoms of menopause. Fiber from the stems has been used to make paper, fabric, basketry, rope and as a stuffing for cushions. More recently, kudzu has been incorporated in soaps, lotions and other beauty products; it has been researched as a potential source of biofuel ; and microbreweries have incorporated kudzu as a flavoring in beer!

Department of Agriculture removed kudzu from its list of acceptable cover crops for its Agricultural Conservation Program in the s, and in it demoted the plant to weed status.

One more thing we know for sure: We'd never plant it on purpose. What else do you know about kudzu? By Southern Living. Save FB Tweet More. Those roadside plantings—isolated from grazing, impractical to manage, their shoots shimmying up the trunks of second-growth trees—looked like monsters.

The miraculous vine that might have saved the South had become, in the eyes of many, a notorious vine bound to consume it. Though William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and others in that first great generation of Southern writers largely ignored kudzu, its metaphorical attraction became irresistible by the early s.

For the generations of writers who followed, many no longer intimately connected to the land, kudzu served as a shorthand for describing the Southern landscape and experience, a ready way of identifying the place, the writer, the effort as genuinely Southern.

For many, the vivid depictions of kudzu had simply become the defining imagery of the landscape, just as palms might represent Florida or cactus Arizona.

But for others, kudzu was a vine with a story to tell, symbolic of a strange hopelessness that had crept across the landscape, a lush and intemperate tangle the South would never escape. Confronted by these bleak images, some Southerners began to wear their kudzu proudly, evidence of their invincible spirit. Kudzu: A Southern Musical toured the country. In news media and scientific accounts and on some government websites, kudzu is typically said to cover seven million to nine million acres across the United States.

In the latest careful sampling, the U. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about , acres of forestland, an area about the size of a small county and about one-sixth the size of Atlanta.

By way of comparison, the same report estimates that Asian privet had invaded some 3. Invasive roses had covered more than three times as much forestland as kudzu. And though many sources continue to repeat the unsupported claim that kudzu is spreading at the rate of , acres a year—an area larger than most major American cities—the Forest Service expects an increase of no more than 2, acres a year.