Multi-flora rose, Help!!

Hi! I'm new here, and I am really digging (pun intended) these forums and all of the wonderful videos Paul has put up.

My husband and I bought a home with 2.2 acres, about 1 of which is wooded. In the woods we are blessed with many raspberry bushes, BUT we also have multi-flora rose. I noticed some very creative ways of dealing with invasives, such as planting something that would choke them out. Do you know of any techniques of getting rid of the multi-flora rose? I am curious where to start?


Thanks!!

I have been slowly attacking with a maddox/pick axe grabbing by root and try to get most of root that is not thorny and pull out.  Then I typically like to burn them.   I have seen old multiflora rose vines buried in my digging and seemed to start coming alive?

Things that might choke out multi-flora rose: bamboo, kudzu, honeysuckle...

I had an uncle I remember saying, "They just love a good Bush Hoggin'!"

I can't speak to actually getting rid of them, as we only had one, so I dug it out. Until you are able to remove them, you could harvest the rose hips to at least keep them from spreading by seed. They can be great food and medicine.

We do have the bush honeysuckle and Japanese knotweed in abundance and I know from that it can be overwhelming, thinking that you need to get rid of all of it right away. But it can be so much work as these are some determined plants! I have found it much better for my mental health to take a more gradual approach. For example, girdling the honeysuckle rather than trying to totally cut them all down at once and dig them out. Or pulling knotweed as it emerges, rather than trying to dig up every last root. I think doing it this way has also helped me learn more about why those "invasive" plants are doing so well and what role they are filling in the ecosystem, since it gives me some time to observe. I don't like to remove plants when I don't know yet what work they're doing. This also gives me better ideas about what would be good to replace them with.
What might the multiflora rose be doing in your woods that is beneficial and who else could do that instead?

Another thought, I have found wild grape to be great at smothering honeysuckle. It could be a potential competitor for the multiflora rose. But it's quite rowdy itself and might cause other issues and/or make it tricky to get at the rose to remove it.

Multiflora Rose can grow quite tall and wide, making it hard to approach on foot. If you have a pole pruner (for pruning fruit trees), they work very nicely for reaching in horizontally through the thorns and sawing the plant off at its base. If you want to eliminate MRose permanently, you'll have to mow/cut continuously, probably for years, or else burn a large bonfire over the root system of each plant.

Goats and pigs can probably take them out, too, but I don't have any experience with that. Good luck!

While they're there, enjoy the rose smell wafting off their flowers each season in bloom. Probably early July in my neck of the woods.

And as others have said, digging their roots out by hand is the other way to eliminate them. Sometimes that's practical, if it's a small plant.

I have pulled up whatever would pull out, then dumped rocksalt in the hole on the broken roots. (Our rainfall dilutes this such that in a few months the salt is no longer visible and the gass is green. Think twice if you get less rainfall.) Now we mostly cut them back severely then give the sheep access. They love rose. One in the open will probably die eventually. One in a fence row? If the sheep can only access one side, you have a rose hedge. They'll help maintain it, though.

I am still digging up and drying out all I pull out in separate pile on a log.

Not only multifloral, but some other broad leaf with thorns too.  I don't think I will bury these thorns but try burning them, maybe try building a small can rocket oven to burn them.

In photo got both.  Not worried about this stuff blowing away with all the thorns!

I like to get a tow strap cinched around the base of the plant.  You can use one or more poles or tree branches to "part" the brambles to get access to the plant base. Then I'll use a come-along to pull it out, roots and all. Then you can drag them off by the tow strap to be burned.

Let it grow ther, bloom and enjoy it

Richard Kniffin wrote:Multiflora Rose can grow quite tall and wide, making it hard to approach on foot. If you have a pole pruner (for pruning fruit trees), they work very nicely for reaching in horizontally through the thorns and sawing the plant off at its base.

This is the big problem for me, and perhaps for anybody else who is working primarily with hand tools instead of, say, a big brush hog.   I have one on my property that's the size of a schoolbus and another one that's about at big as a large SUV.  Haven't tackled those yet, and anyway they make great wildlife habitat like any defensive thicket.  But smaller ones that are trying to choke out my fruit trees, I've been attacking recently with my battery-electric pruning shears.  Love those things!  I don't have to stuff my arms/hands inside the bush to cut at the base any more; I can just stand in the sunshine and go "zip zip zip" as I chop the thing into 18" pieces and let each piece fall to the ground.  It's a bit slow and painstaking but there's no disposal problem (in my climate I've never seen them root from cuttings left on the surface of the ground, although it's possible in theory I suppose) and it's completely bloodless, which is a huge improvement.  I don't even have to wear gloves because I never touch the stalks!

Goats will kill them. They love the leaves and tender branches and will keep eating it until it doesn't come back.

More multi-flora rose collected.  I cleared area to go after more of this multi-flora rose.