Utah Fishing ReportsI took this article from a posting on American Family website. I have modified it to make it more family friendly.
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 F*#$E! 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.
Hi Dear Bears Butt,
I have tried your way on how to kill a Yucca. It really worked, so great. My Yucca branched from the ground into two separate Yuccas but from the same root.They were about 6 feet tall. First I tried on one of them and repeated this procedure FOUR TIMES; 15days – 21days between each session until I started to see the leaves yellowing. After I sow the positive results on the first Yucca, I proceeded to the other Yucca but on this one I only did it twice. Wow – Had same result. The secret is that you have to be patient and this takes time for the positive final result.
I know you posted this a million years ago, but I am desperate for an answer to this question:
If I follow these rules exactly, is there any chance that the Roundup that is being absorbed into the yucca plant roots/tubers in the ground will infect the roots of other plants right next to it? I removed a yucca plant many years ago and planted a camelia plant in its place. Little did I know, I had clearly not removed ALL of the yucca plant, because every week I see new baby yuccas trying to poke up under the camelia! So I am very concerned about my camelia if I perform this trick.
I think it will leach over and take out your Camelia, but you have to do something about that Yucca, so to my way of thinking, it is the sacrifice that must be made. Who knows, maybe the Camelia will survive.
I hope more plants did not begin to grow. Somewhere I read that when you kill one baregrass yucca, more will appear in a circle. It is the plant’s way of staying alive. I wish I could find that article because it was very good. It mentioned the kind of “stuff” to spray on the center of the plant. When I looked it up, it was expensive — about $40.00.