What cut-stump treatment actually looks like

Anyone can cut buckthorn. A saw and an afternoon and the wall of green is gone. Come back in eighteen months and there are five stems where there was one, and now you cannot walk through it at all.

Cutting buckthorn without treating the stump makes the problem worse. That is not a sales line, it is how the plant responds to being cut.

The sixty seconds that matter

A fresh cut face is still moving fluid. Treatment applied in that window goes down into the root system with it. Wait, and the cut seals, and you have applied herbicide to a piece of wood.

That is why the photograph of drilled, treated stumps is the one worth having. It is the only visible evidence that the job was done rather than mown.

Haul it out

Cut brush left in a pile is a seed pile. The berries are still on it. It goes on the trailer and it leaves.

It takes seasons

There is a seed bank in that soil and it is patient. Buckthorn seed stays viable for years. The first clearing is the dramatic one; the second and third years are the ones that decide whether it holds.