How to Kill a Yucca Plant
Remember the past two summers when I was obsessed with killing the damn yucca plant in my front yard?
I actually managed to kill it. Since it got warm this spring, I have been anxiously checking and rechecking the area where it grew before to make sure no rogue sprouts are coming back. Since it is August, I think I am actually safe.
I keep getting search engine hits for “How to Kill a Yucca Plant” so I am posting this as a public service message.
Things that did NOT kill the yucca plant:
- Squirting it with Round Up.
- Chopping off all the leaves, spraying it with bee killer (there was a beehive in its roots), then painting the leaf stumps with Round Up.
- Mixing Round Up with oil then spraying it on the leaves.
- Digging out a 10 foot by 5 foot area 2 feet deep, throwing out hundreds of gallons of roots and dirt, then filling the hole with an entire bottle of total vegetation kill. (While this didn’t kill the yucca, two years later we still can’t get grass to grow in the area of the yard near the former hole. Weeds yes, grass no.)
- Digging a bigger hole and using more random plant killing chemicals.
- Filling the hole with water, then covering it with a tarp for a month in an attempt to drown the yucca and periodically re-filling the nasty moldy hole with more water.
- Setting the hole on fire.
How did I finally kill the yucca?
1.) I let one of the sprouts grow until the leaves were about as long as my forearm.
2.) I gathered them up into a bunch and held them together with a rubber band.
3.) I cut the tops off the leaves with scissors.
4.) Filled a large plastic cup with Round UP (possibly the long-term plant killing kind, I can’t remember)
5.) Submerged the leaf-tops several inches deep in Round UP.
6) Weighed them down with a big rock so they would stay in the cup.
7.) Covered the cup with plastic so rain wouldn’t dilute the RoundUp. (Make sure that some of the leaves are exposed to sunlight because photosynthesis is how RoundUP works, I think).
8.) Waited about a month.
Then the MOTHER FUCKER died.
And that, my friends, is how you kill a yucca plant.
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PS. Would you believe how much money we spend on organic groceries and on my organic garden and still I unloaded a huge toxic payload of chemicals in the front yard to kill that plant? I was a woman obsessed.
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:05 am
This post cracks me up because I think that was the very FIRST post that I read of yours and when you said it was 2 years ago, I was like “wow, time sure does fly in blogland”. I’m glad it was killed…what a pain in the a**.
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:20 am
Thank you!!! I inherited a yard/garden with so many of these sprouting up, including some which are creeping steadily into the yard and growing larger every year. I think the roses are shading out one of them to death, but I’ve been losing my patience with the things…
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Wow, at least nobody can ever call you a quitter.
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Moby Yucca? Aye Captain!
August 2nd, 2007 at 2:40 pm
We have three in our front yard that are going down. As god is my witness. I hate them. They are all over our property, and I can live with a few, but these three are so trashy.
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:12 pm
We got rid of our two yuccas by moving to a new house!
August 3rd, 2007 at 6:53 am
Thank You Thank You, now I can FINALLY destroy the menace! I thought I had the only ever living yucca!
May 18th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
It has taken me two years to be successful, but I have a yucca killing suggestion to add. After having a large yucca removed, the roots continued to sprout, especially since they were chopped up and scattered in the process. Where I had a couple of large yuccas removed, dozens of smaller ones began to sprout. I used a small paint brush to apply Ortho Brush-B-Gon, Poison Ivy Killer, full-strength, to the small yuccas as they sprouted. It took a couple years for all the potential roots to sprout and several applications to kill each sprout, but this spring I believe I can say that I have eradicated the yucca using perseverance and poison.
May 27th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
For nine months now, my husband and I have been killing a bank of yucca plants (about a dozen). We dug them up (tons of roots!) and now, every day, one of us patrols the new flowerbed for the first 1/8″ of highly recognizable green tips. Not one day has gone by without a green tip. I dug one up the other day and the white part was no less than 12 inches long. It’s spooky to think of this damned thing growing, growing, growing. Alas, even at a foot down, it broke off so I didn’t get the source. But we are people obsessed. These damned yuccas will not win!!!
June 9th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
We moved into our home 2 years ago. We dug up approx. 10 yucca plants. The holes were about 2 ft. deep and 2ft wide for each plant. We had professional landscaping done. I’ll be damned if those little shits didn’t come back! We have used Roundup and Spectracide ( liquid and Gel), by the gallons, pulled the little stems comming back up, and nothing will kill them! Help! We are now on a daily watch of just spraying them. Ugh.
June 10th, 2008 at 12:15 am
Did you read the blog post you commented on? You can’t kill them by spraying. You have to let ONE spout grow to be about 12 inches long. Then you gather the leaves together with a rubberband, snip of the very tops and dip the tops into a cup of roundup. You let that sit for a week (for over kill, you could replace the roundup every few days with new) and it will kill all the roots. Believe me, I have tried everything else. THis technique worked for two different Yuccas in two different locations.
June 21st, 2008 at 7:11 pm
do you believe they sell those things………….I just moved to a place with yuccas…..WV!…………THEY ARE SPREADING LIKE WILDFIRE……….I also used Southern STates root killer………It takes a couple of tries..but they are dying………as I see new ones coming up…………..I make sure I get the seeds and throw them in a field where the annoying four wheelers are……Kill two birds etc………..
July 23rd, 2008 at 3:08 am
[...] I love my blog. I love the friends I have met here (both IRL and online). I like getting feedback on things I am thinking through. I like going back to see what the hell I was thinking in the past (even though it is often embarrassing). I like it when people think I am funny. I like having a place to vent. I like meeting new people. I like opening my email and seeing new comments. I like knowing that someone will stumble on this blog and know they aren’t crazy or they aren’t the only one who ever felt how they feel right now. I like helping people battle the scourge that is yucca plants. Basically, I blog because I like it and the pros far outweigh the cons. If it wasn’t enjoyable any more, I would stop. Right now, blogging makes my little world better. [...]
August 24th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
It’s so good to know that others are tormented as we are by inherited yuccas. We moved into this wonderful house (Kansas, just outside KC) last November (it’s now August). I knew the yuccas had to go, and I thought I could just dig out these ugly, spiny monsters. Now I know better, with the doggone things sprouting up six times for every one we axed out. The EPA or FDA should require warning labels on yuccas in the nurseries as to what the guy who plants them is inflicting on all future owners of the property. I am considering giving up and just chopping them back to the ground every year.