If you are dealing with a large number of invasive plants, you probably can't work on them all at once. Below is an example of a plan to prioritize your efforts.

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Give priority to

• Invasive vines threatening trees

• New arrivals – eliminate uncommon invasives and new arrivals before they can get a real foothold.  Go for eradication.

• Protecting high-quality habitat. If that habitat is surrounded by invasives, work outward from there. Another way to put that is that if you have an infestation too large to handle all at once, work from the outside in.

• Special needs and circumstances – there is reason to believe that taking out all Ailanthus or most of it should be a top priority to slow down the Spotted Lanternfly invasion.  There may be other cases, like protecting some special ecosystem or rare plants that also require a high priority.  Plants that are dangerous to the public could also become a priority.

• Most damage – what invasive plants are causing the most damage

• What is feasible – where can applying resources actually make a real, lasting difference

• Shoot on sight list – which plants can we treat and get to the point where they are rare enough that we can actually stop what we are doing every day and go take them out whenever we find one.  Trees and some less common plants are the first ones you are likely to get onto this list.

• If you can address all the above and still have capacity left to do more, then you can consider other factors like aesthetics, public reactions, public access, impacts on neighboring properties, and proximity to spreading vectors like public trails, streams that flood, etc.

• A whole other set of criteria may apply if you have bodies of water and aquatic invasive plants to deal with.  This can get into impacts on public recreation and public safety.

• In almost all cases, controlling invasives will be a multi-year process. For example, expect three years of treatment for most invasive vines and five years for wisteria.

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Consider the timing

• WInter is a great time to work on many invasive plants (or to hire landscape workers to do the job). Summer may be problematic because of heavy growth, ticks, and poison ivy, not to mention the heat.

• It's helpful to kill plants before they go to seed. Removing smaller plants means there is less bulk to deal with but in some cases may give them more time to grow again and form fruit that year.

• Some plants need to be killed BEFORE cutting them down. Simply cutting them may cause them to send up a hundred new plants from the roots. Tree-of-Heaven is a classic example.

• The effect of herbicide applications is highly dependent on timing. You must carefully research the timing for each species. Find details on the Blue Ridge PRISM website.

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To stabilize a steep slope after removing invasives such as English Ivy, you can put down a jute fiber net made for this purpose.