Ok, I really wasn’t expecting this.
I have a lot of Japanese Honeysuckle around me to the point that it has become quite the nuisance—very difficult to control once established, no matter what technique one uses. My usual, most successful approach is to follow vines to the central
root mass and then ruthlessly dig out that mass and make sure it never ever gets the chance to come back. For me, this involves a combination of mowing that which can be mowed (JH doesn’t really like being mowed), digging out any new shoot that I missed and shading whenever possible. This is a long term
project.
I had several
trees that had minor JH infestations but I just had not gotten to them yet. But around here about a week ago, we got a cold blast—negative 6 degrees Fahrenheit—in a region that rarely sees 10 degrees. I looked out at the JH vines today and thought about tackling them, but the foliage is all brown! Those patches of JH do sit in a cold pocket so the temperatures may have dropped even further. In fact, our frost depth is barely 1/2 an inch, and that’s when we actually have some sustained freezing temperatures.
I am wondering if the foliage is dead-brown looking because the air temperatures got too cold for the foliage or if the shallow root system got frost damage. In the 30ish years I have lived here, I have never seen JH succumb to anything, but the cold we had last week was record-breaking for the region.
While JH is a major problem around here, is it a problem further north, especially in places where temperatures regularly drop below zero? I grew up in Central Illinois and every year we seemed to get at least two nights where temperatures dropped to about negative 20 and there was no JH. But I always attributed that to JH being introduced recently. Could cold temperatures really control JH?
Thanks in advance,
Eric
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