This afternoon I dragged out the wood chipper and tried to shred the chokecherry branches, but the chipper jammed up immediately. I vaguely recall that we had trouble with it jamming before, and I can't remember what we did. Maybe the leaves have to be dried so they don't gum up the blades. Anyway, the chokecherry is in a big pile outside the goat area, so I guess it's okay if we don't get them shredded before the goats arrive.
Then I decided that since I was outside already, I might as well dig up that azalea. I give it a pretty low chance of survival sitting in a pot for a week. Then again, we never liked it and were thinking about digging it out anyway. So I'm not willing to go to any effort to preserve it.
While digging out the azalea I noticed more of those blasted chokecherries! So I got the loppers back out (hard to find them, Georg had put them on top of the truck and I can't really see that high up) and spent some more time wading around in the poison ivy, cutting down choke cherry. Then I decided that I might as well take advantage of being all suited up, so to speak. So I went around the yard pulling up poison ivy that wasn't in the goat area. It comes up pretty easily, though occasionally I found one with a deep root that was hard to pull.
It wasn't really hard work, but being in long sleeves in the middle of the day pretty well wiped me out. And here I thought the point of the goats was that I wouldn't have to handle the poison ivy, they would take care of it. It didn't quite work out that way.
Meanwhile Georg had gone out and bought me some Tecnu. I used it to clean off as thoroughly as I could. I still don't even know if I'm immune or not. I'll know if I wake up with a rash tomorrow.
Azaleas are toxic? I guess that rules out me bringing the goats to my place ... I've got bazillions of gigantic azaleas.
I've been doing poison ivy patrol in my yard, and I'm happy that I've only found brand-new sproutlings, no established vines. But I'm sick of getting poison ivy even when I cover myself up, so I go after it the non-eco-friendly way with Roundup. But I'm very, very careful to only get the Roundup on the poison ivy leaves and nothing else.
Azaleas are listed as highly toxic by NCSU: http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/consumer/poison/Rhodosp.htm
Our dog Lina used to chew on ours and never got sick. I don't think she ate any leaves, she just liked stripping leaves off branches for fun.
The goat people use electric fencing to pen in the goats, so maybe they'd be able to fence off your azaleas?
I've read you can tie a sponge or pad to the end of a stick and spray Roundup on the sponge. Then dab the sponge against the weed. You don't have to worry about a breeze sending the spray onto your garden plants .