This morning 15 goats arrived at the future home of Lucky and Blessed Garden to tackle a dense kudzu thicket at our home in downtown Asheville. Kudzu, a wonderful plant but dangerously invasive in the Southern US, is very difficult to erradicate because it stores energy deep in the earth in a large tuber and spreads by sinking roots every foot or so along its rapidly growing vine. I could have had a bull-dozer come in to rip out the vines and dig down till we found the root. Bull-dozing would have been very expensive, destroyed the fertile soil underneath the kudzu, used a lot of fossil fuels and made a lot of noise. Instead I called Penny and Shelley at
Got Your Goat Weed Management.
Goats are quiet, they fertilize and aerate the soil, they are affordable and they are super cute. After the goats eat up all the kudzu, I'll remove the dead vines and find the primary root limb. Then I'll cut it off and quickly dap some Round Up onto the cut. In early autumn, plants are bringing energy back down into their root systems in preparation for dormancy in winter. So the Round Up placed strategically will kill the big tuber deep down. I may end up digging that big tuber out, but it will be a targeted dig rather than destroying the entire lot.
