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Hi, I am David Epstein, and this is Growing Wisdom.
Again in my yard, I am going to talk about poison ivy today. If you got it this year, or it can be a real pain, covering arms, legs and even in your face. So I want to talk about it on how to identify it, and some of the precautions that you might want to take in terms of preventing in getting poison ivy. You have heard the little rhyme leaves of tree and let it be, they are not all plants of tree leaves obvious to your poison ivy. But this is poison ivy. In the summer, the margins of some of the poison ivy plants actually become a little bit more toot or jagged. This is climbing up the tree, and you could see that these leaves are smoother, so you have to be careful, because poison ivy has really different variations of itself.
Now if you are working with poison ivy couple of things, long pants, this is very important ;gloves, you definitely want to use a good pair of gloves. When you have poison ivy, there are couples of ways you can treat it. You can take an herbicide, and just literally paint it on the leaves like that, and just let that do its thing and eventually that will kill the poison ivy.
Now, if you have a lot of poison ivy, that is going to take a long time, right? So one thing you can do is pulling it out, because this is a vine, this is really run through the bed here, and what I want to do, is I want to follow this back as far as I can get it, so I can hopefully get the roots here. Notice that I pulled out this long piece of poison ivy with these roots. The roots have one of the highest concentrations of urushiol. Now, urushiol is the chemical in here that causes the reaction. So you have to be extremely careful with this. Now my gloves are contaminated, so you have to be very careful when you remove this. I will take my gloves, and I literally peel them inside-out. The oil probably is not in the inside of the glove.
This hand does not have anything on it and then I do that and those will go on the wash. I have a poison ivy scrub, and we going to just go to the hose there. I will scrub my arms, my hands, and what is this doing, is this is removing any potential oils that I may have gotten on accidentally.
If you have a poison ivy outbreak, there are lots of things that you can do. We have several website, we are going to put them up for you to look at. We also have the website at the bottom of the screen, so you can print those out. If you have a very severe reaction, do not wait; call a medical professional, because they can give you medicine. You cannot get over the counter. That will help to clear it up in just a few days.
So you are watching this video and you might be watching it in the GrowingWisdom.com, or one of our other sites, where we distributed our videos. If you go to GrowingWisdom.com, we have over 200 videos, it is all about gardening and things you can do in your yard. We update every single week. I am David Epstein, for Growing Wisdom.
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