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.
I sawed down the 6 big yucca plants I had that were at least 7 ft. tall but at least 50 more small ones came back up and I chop or pull them up every three weeks. I used Round-Up and got no where. But I was wondering about the liquid you get from using Damp Rid. I use it to kill red ants by taking a rod a putting it in the center of the fire ant hill as deep as it will go and then pour the liuid accumilated from using it in the house, and pour it in the hole and it sure kills them. I know several people that have used salt to kill trees they didn’t want in their yard but were not allowed to cut down otherwise. God, hot I hate these plants!
I don’t understand how you cut the tops and then put leaves in a cup of Round Up. The leaves are growing up, not downward.
The yuccas in my yard in Va. stay green in winter even when it’s below zero for a week. They stop the blades on the lawn mower. They stab you if you reach for them. The blooms suck in bees never to return. I even lost a cat in the thicket of them. They must be stopped.
We dug out our yucca plant today. It was about 5 feet tall and sharp as hell. I have been obsessed with killing the thing for months. Thanks for your help. We are gonna wait till one of the suckers rears its ugly head, and drown its amputated limbs in round-up. It. Must. Die. This is a gladiatorial fight and I’ll be screwed if that fucker’s gonna get one over on me.
Half a stick of dynamite???