Two things, there is a product called Ivy armor at any drugstore, that you can apply to your skin it's whenever you were going to be rethink you're going to be around poison ivy. The telephone lines when they came to our house and had to get through some to get to the phone linesman told me about the product. I will get poison ivy bad enough to need a steroid shots and I swell up like a character in Farside cartoons. One thing I need to note everyone thinks poison ivy spread and no it is not. What happens is that upon doing the laundry you can expose yourself to the oil to have gotten on your clothes or perhaps you set on something and transfer the oil from your clothing to the object you sat up on or you may have transfer the oil up toward your face and long arms etc. taking your shirt off things of that nature. I always have my family their clothing inside out so that when I put it in the laundry I did not get the poison ivy oil from their clothing. The fact is that what you have when you think the poison ivy has spread is in fact a latent outbreak from having come in contact with the oil sometime after your initial contact. Also, it cannot be spread from one person to another from the liquid in any of the blisters. Old Wives Tales!

The old saying was that if you see poison ivy, jewelweed will be growing close by. Jewelweed likes rich, moist soil (whereas poison ivy is opportunistic and grows in lots of different places). So while you may well see poison ivy growing near jewelweed, the reverse is not all that commonly true. Sad to say, some recent studies show jewelweed is not effective in preventing poison ivy rash on exposure. Other folk remedies have little if any evidence supporting them, aside from testimonials. Given that people's susceptibility to poison ivy varies so widely, the plant has such a variable appearance (meaning some exposures aren't really to poison ivy) and other factors like mechanical removal may be involved in stories about plants/herbs preventing P.I. attacks, these reports will be unreliable. Prevention is probably best. At the least suspicion that I may have contacted poison ivy while gardening, I run into the house and wash thoroughly.

I've never heard that before Alicia- i will have to try that with some of the things that are a pain to clean! Rosebush, it's going to be hard to get rid of it without using roundup, but i do wish you luck! Is there anyone in your family or friends who's not as sensitive that you could bribe to do the dirty work? If you have any touch me not, aka jewelweed, (impatiens pallida or biflora) growing, you can crush some stems in your hand and rub the juice over where you've touched it and that's supposed to help. Burt's bees even sells jewelweed soap for that purpose. I've read that anything that really messed with the skin's acidity, either way - either mild acids or alkali (like baking powder or vinegar) help to keep the urishiol oil from binding with your skin. I like the technu soap and have had great results using it through the years. When i do get the rash, Zanafel soap helps a lot- it has granules and supposedly can break the urishiol/skin bond after the rash is there. It certainly cuts down on the duration for me. It's very pricey, though, so i use it judiciously. It's not well known, but if you do get a bad rash, the docs can prescribe a couple creams that help clear it up fairly fast, too. Both fluocinonide (lidex) and triamoinolone work wonders. Lidex is stronger (a friend lent me some after a bad case) but when i asked the doc for my daughter who got a wicked case a few yrs back they said it was too strong and prescribed the triam stuff instead.

I just want to give an update on my poison ivy. After due deliberation and much consideration I decided I could carefully target just the poison ivy leaves with an Ortho poison ivy killer without it getting into the ground. I began with a small area first and waited to see what would happen. At first I thought perhaps it had no effect at all, but then a few weeks later I noticed that tiny patch I'd sprayed was brown and dead. So I sprayed the rest. It took a lot of patience and a couple of rounds to get it all and is a slow process just as daninthedirt said, but it looks as though it has finally succeeded! So my next step will be removing that patch of dirt and hopefully removing any roots with it and then bring in some fresh dirt. I figure that's the best way to assure I'm removing as much poison residue in the soil as possible. I'll wait awhile before doing this step to give the poison a chance to complete its job on that root system. I, of course did these courses of poison during long stretches of dry weather so it didn't wash off the leaves. Next time this problem arises I'm going to try the vinegar recipe method for comparison. Thanks for all the help and good advice!