How I (Arlene) Controlled Ivy

Hi, My name is Arlene and I wanted to share how I controlled ivy. I have a little room in the basement part of my house that was once, used for coal for the furnace.  It has a small window where they shoveled in it. The walls had built in shelving which I removed because of its age and because I would find mice droppings on them. But that wasn’t the worst part of this room.

I thought of this as the roomin the Amityville Horror movie, the room in their basement. Theirs was painted red and mine is not, but I grow unwanted things in it. Scary things in it and things I must control.

In the corners I would grow mushrooms. They got huge, as high as my knees, and they were deadly looking.  I tried looking them up more than once in books and the net, and never could find anything comparable.  I am not sure they are from this world. I checked with the Dept of Agriculture with Penn State and the reason I was able to grow mushrooms indoors was basically because of the ash from the coal embedded in the corners of the room.  They don’t grow too much anymore because of my repeated attempts with bleach and water.

I like Ivy  But I didn’t want it growing in my house either. In this room their is a “termite” brick around the top of the wall, where Ivy came in from the outside.  Along with this Ivy which seems to grow a foot a minute, I would get bugs, ants, and all kinds of creepy crawling things. I tolerated the English Ivy but I had to draw the line when Poison Ivy started to creep in.  I was a little embarrassed when the cable man asked me if I could remove the poison ivy growing where he had to drill. He added, ” lady, I never saw that in a house.” I told him, ” you never saw this house.”

How I fixed this problem was pretty simple but it was time consuming. I first sealed any crack I saw with some ready-mixed cement which came easily in a tube and then, walked through the ivy on the outside of the house ( wearing boots & the works) and either removing it or cutting it back. It was actually growing onto the roof. After calling a roofer to see if he could help to remove it we ended up doing it ourselves. I keep the English Ivy which won’t stop growing to a bare minimum of an inch high and the Poison Ivy to the best of my ability gone.