I have about 12 well established(~15 feet tall) willow trees growing in the middle of my pond. They stand in 3-5 feet of water. How do I kill them? I am trying to avoid any cutting because whatever I cut will have to be done from the boat then loaded on the boat and taken to shore. I was hoping for an easier solution than this. Can I drill holes in some of the branches and pour herbicide in?

Read up on basal injection of trees, or just tree injection. Pay attention to the chemicals used, and be very careful when applied to keep pond water contamination to a minimum. Tordon RTU and Pathway are a few that are used for injection purposes.

http://www.forestry.state.al.us/PDFs/ResourceSheets/Herbicides/Individual_Tree_Injection.pdf

A sneaky trick is to flip up a section of bark in an unobtrusive place, bore a hole, pack it with copper sulphate then flip the bark back in place.

i would just girdle them. for an insurance measure wet a brush or sponge with ortho brush be gone and swab the girdled area being careful not to get chemicals in water.

What DIED suggested is my preferred method.

Girdle it twice, about 6 inches apart one above the other.

Thanks for all the advice! Some of the willows have some smaller limbs. Can I just cut those off and rub the Ortho on or do I need to girdle even the smallest limbs?

He means girdle the trunks

Forget about the small limbs

sure you can cut them off and treat the stubs. how much brush do you want to have stay in the pond? after you kill the main trees, they will eventually collapse into your pond which you may or may not want, but submerged brush does make great habitat.

i have had good success on all my unwanted tree species by either girdling or just heading off and saturating the fresh cut stubs with the ortho (full strength - not diluted).

Girdling is usually done at the base of trees. I suppose you could girdle individual branches as well, but you would have to get all of them to kill the tree. If you kill all the branches the tree may try to send up new branches the next year, similar to what happens after you "top" a tree. If you killed all the branches for a couple of years before the leaves came out I think you would win the war.

Sorry for the repeat guys. Multitasking sure slows down response time.

The problem is that the trees sit in 3-5 feet of water. I won't be able to get very close to the base of the trees. It sounds like I could cut and saturate the smaller limbs and girdle and saturate the larger ones. Think this approach would work? Is this overkill?

I am lazy. I just girdle the trunk once with the chain saw 1 inch deep. When I want to make sure it dies, I girdle twice about 2 inches apart & use a crowbar to split out the wood & bark in between the 2 cuts. I have never tried it from a boat.

From a boat, keep it quick & simple: girdle once about 1 inch deep. Depending on the tree, it may take a year to die completely.

Im curious about the same thing. I didnt even know this was a concern until another member pointed it out in one of my pics. My willows on the dam side are small currently. I plan on cutting them soon while the pond is lower for wiinter and anything big I will deal with. I ma wondering how things went for you since you posted this?

RUMBLON