How to Get Rid of Poison Ivy | Ask the Expert
Helaine Hughes from the Poison Ivy Removal Company in Greenfield, NH, shares her tips on how to get rid of poison ivy – both in your yard and on your clothes or skin.
By Joe Bills|Jun 01 2016|
Coffee By Design | Portland, Maine
Photo Credit : Katherine Keenan
Photo Credit : Steve Legato/The New York Times/Redux
Expert Poison Ivy Removal Advice
Learn How to Identify Poison Ivy
It’s easy to confuse poison ivy with other common plants. Its leaves can vary in size, color, and texture, and it can spread along the ground, climb trees or fences, or grow like a shrub. Poison ivy’s defining characteristic is its clusters of three leaves, positioned on the branch like a head and two arms.
What Causes Poison Ivy Rash?
The urushiol oil contained in poison ivy serves as the plant’s natural defense against fungal attacks. It also reacts with human skin, causing a painful rash and oozing blisters. “The key is knowing enough about the oil that you don’t get it everywhere,” Hughes says. “It can stay on an object for as long as five years. I’m OCD-level careful about what I touch. Items are either clean or dirty. If you don’t know, it’s dirty.”
Using Chemical Herbicides For Poison Ivy
Chemical herbicides are a common removal tool, but Hughes doesn’t endorse that approach. “It takes a lot to get the job done,” she explains, “and chemicals leach into the groundwater. Those poisons linger for a long time, endangering kids and pets.”
How to Pull Poison Ivy By the Root
The only completely effective way to remove poison ivy is to pull it out by the roots, Hughes advises: “We get in there and rip it out by hand. It’s important to get as much of the root as possible. If we get to the end of a root and the tip is white, that indicates a recent break, and we keep digging. A black tip means an older break, probably the end of that line.”
What to Wear When Removing Poison Ivy
After some early lessons learned the hard way, Hughes and her team have adopted hazmat suits as their uniform of choice. As a homemade alternative, wear long pants, long sleeves, and washable gloves and sneakers; use tape to eliminate exposure at the wrists and ankles. Once the job is done, all clothes go straight into the washing machine, and you go straight into the shower.
How to Dispose of Poison Ivy
Hughes recommends putting vines and roots into trash bags as you pull them and disposing of them in a landfill compactor. Burning poison ivy is a horrible idea: The oil spreads on the ashes and smoke, and if it gets into your lungs, you’ll likely end up in the hospital.
How Long Do You Have After Poison Ivy Exposure to Wash It off Your Skin?
You have about a 15-minute window to wash the oil off after skin contact, Hughes cautions, although the window might be shorter in people who are more sensitive. No special soap is required. If you don’t have a ready water supply, an outdoor skin cleanser like Tecnu can be effective on its own.
Is Poison Ivy Contagious?
Once the oil has been washed away, you can’t “catch” poison ivy from someone else; neither the rash nor the blisters contain urushiol. But the oil can be transferred from clothes, pets, or tools. For safety’s sake, Hughes has rules. “The front of truck is clean; the back is dirty,” she says. “Nothing contaminated goes in the front, ever. Anything that’s in the back, I always assume it’s dirty.”
Do you have any tips for how to prevent poison ivy? How to get rid of poison ivy? How to treat it once you’ve got it? Let us know in the comments!
The best way to get rid of the poison ivy rash is with a hot blow dryer. Break the blisters and then use the blow dryer to blow hot air on it for as long as you can take it. Do this as many times as you can (I usually blow hot air on it three times, two or three times each day). Within a day or two, it will be dried up. 🙂
I found that saturating the blisters once broken with rubbing alcohol seemed to dry them out faster
I had a friend who worked for the highway department in our small town. He told me that they kept chlorine bleach available to apply to the rash. I tried it because I am super sensitive to it, and it did work. It stopped the itching, the spreading, and dried it up in days rather than two weeks or more. I used a cotton ball to rub the chlorine bleach into the rash.
One additional precaution should be added for removing large amounts of poison ivy, or if you are sensitive to it. Wear a respirator or good disposable dust mask. My husband and I took all of the above precautions – even wearing clothes, shoes and gloves that we also placed in trash bags and threw away. We tore out a large roadside patch. We were probably a bit too rough when pulling it out since we wanted to get it done quickly. A couple of days later we both had rashes in our arm pits and other unmentionable places. Then it started spreading all over us. The dermatologist said we had systemic cases from breathing in the oils.
You can use Dawn as an alternative to remove the oil. My friend’s backyard is covered in PI and his kids are constantly running through it and they have a bottle of Dawn in their shower. As for remedies, when I had it last year, I used a combination of oatmeal pack, witch hazel, apple cider vinegar and salt water. It was the shortest amount of time I had PI and I’m overly sensitive to it.
Approximately 34 years ago I bought some land and it had poison Ivy that were more trees with the vines coming from the ground a good 5 inches in diameter, growing up old growth trees 75 feet to 125 feet. I sawed and chopped and yanked with no protection and then… did I suffer. Every part of my exposed body had huge red blisters on blisters, my neck, arms, legs, belly, ankles and feet. This went on for 2 months but I didn’t scratch, and near went out of my mind controlling myself, then I screamed when I poured bottles of rubbing alcohol over the open wounds to dry them and keep infection away. The only positive from this experience is the fact that I can roll in the stuff now and maybe, a big maybe, a single, very tiny red blister will try to form on a finger after aggressively pulling poison ivy bare handed but it just seems unable to advance in size, dries up and fades away. I still follow your advice for a shower and removal clothes for others sakes more than my own as it seems that massive outbreak bestowed a sacred immunity upon me. I have been told through the years by several homeopathic doctors that immunity can be gained in other ways also but I have no idea if theirs work or not. Your article was great and you employ the best isolation techniques to prevent outbreaks to yourself, your team and others. Everyone would be wise to follow your lead because I can speak to the fact that getting poison ivy is not fun !!!
Hire a goat. They are fond of poison ivy and immune to the oil.
I am very sensitive to poison ivy/poison oak, and found just plain old soap and water works best for the rash, as well as keeping it dry. Opening up the pustules-/opens yourself up for a secondary skin infection.
I had a reaction a month ago; it started as three small dots on my right forearm. Two days later, it was spreading down the right side of my body, and then mirroring on the left side. When my skin started to bubble, about day 4 or 5, I started taking prednisone. I’m still on antihistamines and scratching, but I will definitely start off with prednisone if this ever happens again!
A few years ago I tried to get rid of roadside PI that was spreading into our horse pasture. Out came the weed whacker and Roundup. Don’t ever do that! I had PI so bad from splattering it with a weed whacker that I needed shots and a 10 day course of predisone.
When I pull my tie rhubarb I cut the leaves outside and toss them on the poison ivy that perpetually grows along areas of my yard. No light and it seems to kill it or at least keep it from spreading.
*ripe* not “tie”
Take a hot bath with bleach. Scrub the affected areas with a brush and they will dry out in no time. Protect your eyes!
goats eat poison ivy. You can rent goats to much Japanese knotweed and poison ivy and other noxious plants. But the goats’ coat is covered with the oil so no petting or hugging.
There is a homeopathic remedy called Rhus Tox. Honoring the system that like cures like…Rhus tox has the smallest atom of poison ivy and makes it into a cure. It helped a rather strong allegic action to the oil become a very minor event.
Once it’s on the skin, try witch hazel. In the yard, if you have a poison ivy vine to get rid of and it’s grown up a tree, get a gallon bucket of warm water and mix in 5-8 ounces of table salt. While wearing good gloves, cut the vine close to the ground and pull away from the tree until you have enough to put the stem in the salt water. The vine will “drink” the salt water and die. It works in just a few days. But as the article says – the oil on the leaves is still toxic for a long time.
A friend’s son got a bad rash of poison oak and his skin is discolored and has lost the pigment up his arm, has this happened to anyone? Has anyone had this happen to them? Any remedies?
I mix apple cidar vinegar and table salt. Put it on with a cotton ball and with in 24 hours is drying up.
It doesn’t appear that anyone else has mentioned “Fels-Naptha” — It an old time laundry bar soap, the type used to scrub with on a washboard. It’s one the all-time best poison ivy preventatives … When I was a child, my scout camp had the yellow bars in every shower, and after each hike we were instructed to “wash with the ‘yellow soap!'” — No one at camp ever got poison ivy. I used the same technique with my own kids, and I always have a bar on hand at home and one in my travel bag. It’s inexpensive, and available in most supermarkets and hardware stores. https://preparednessadvice.com/seventy-two-hour-kits/fels-naptha-soap-poison-ivy-poison-oak-and-sumac/
Helaine Hughes is absolutely wonderful. She spent some time with me lately regarding a PI patch that I would like to be rid of. I learned more from her in 30 minutes than I’ve learned in a long life time as mother, school and camp nursed gardener. Congratulation Yankee. Interesting and practical article. Now, how about flourishing during pandemic?
I boil sweet fern and use the reduced syrup on my poison ivy (learned from our old country doctor). Works well!
Thank you for this informative article! One year ago my daughter and I ended up with severe reactions to poison ivy after weeedwhacking and pulling weeds on my parents’ property in NC. We both had intense itching, rashes and huge blisters which lasted weeks. Since then she has reoccurring rashes in the same places occasionally. Most recently, I suffered an allergic reaction to something which caused serious hives and swollen lips that sent me to the ER. It seems strange but I feel like the poison ivy is still wreaking havoc with my body! I’m also terrified of using the weedeater anymore. Is there a way to clean it to make sure there is no more urushiol on it ??? I noticed the author said the oil can stay on surfaces 5 years!!!
You should clean all of your tools with isopropyl Alcohol.
I took Prednisone for PI and tried many lotions, calamine which didn’t work and the hot baths relieved and lower the itchingand it would go away 3-5 days instead of 2-3 weeks. If you realize you contacted, immediately use soap right away and ecen take a bath right away to get rid of the oil. Works well
As a caddy many years ago I often was exposed to poison ivy and my mom would take us to the ocean and we would scrub the blisters with sand and spend the day in the water and sun and it would clear up the worst cases of poison ivy.
Plain vinegar in tiny bowl, use cotton ball turning cotton ball around with each dab to not spread oil. Use as many cotton balls as necessary then throw away cotton balls and vinegar. Any time u feel an inch dab away. Poison Oak or Ivy will dry up very quickly. Open wound will burn but do dab itchy spot anyway. Do not rub or scratch as oil will spread to nearby skin.