As I perused my pictures and past blog posts this morning, I had to laugh at myself for all the "project" names I've created. It's Mr. Freeze's fault. I have to use unique names for our project areas to avoid any circular discussions with Mr. Freeze, otherwise, I find him just aimlessly driving the tractor around trying to find me. HA! But, I've found that using statements such as, "you know - meet me at THAT area where the multi-flora rose and autumn olive were taking over", just does not pinpoint anything, because we have so many problem areas with this stuff.
I am absolutely terrible at getting 'before' and sometimes 'after' pictures of our projects. But, last week, Bob decided to bush-hog a path through Persimmon Island, so we could see what was growing and finish eradicating any remaining non-native plants, if needed. After he cut a path, I was stunned when I walked through to get an idea of the effort.
WOW!
Flowers, flowers, flowers - lots of yellow flars everywhere! Removing all the non-native plants has allowed the native flowers to spread into the partial shade areas.
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| Native Indian Grass, Tickseed Sunflower (aka Bearded Beggarticks / bidens), goldenrod and New England Asters in bloom. |
I was hit in the head repeatedly by the thousands of Pennsylvania Leatherwings flying through...for some reason they really love these flowers. The bumblebees are much better at avoiding my forehead.
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| A bumblebee on one of 11 varieties of sunflowers / bidens in Missouri |
Today, I walked through to start a more targeted eradication. With all the flowers and native plants & trees in here, it is no longer an option to do broad swaths of herbicide application. So, I got out my treatment bucket, my gloves and my cutters. I started with the hundreds of new cherry tree sprouts. While the cherry trees are native, I have other goals for this particular grove: Silky dogwoods, spice bush, river oats, etc., so the cherry trees here have to go.
I cut all the sprouts and treated the cut stumps with a small paint brush and a highly concentrated mix of glyphosate. Using Tordon in this area is no longer an option, since the roots of everything in this small area are likely intertwined together and I don't want to kill the fragrant sumac, persimmons, plums, nor the hackberries that we worked so hard to liberate from the mess!
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| A small bucket with my herbicide, a paintbrush as an applicator and my chainsaw oil. This prevents me from turning over my main container and accidentally spilling any on the ground. |
I practice very careful treatment with the paint brush when there are undesired trees growing up right next to stuff I want to keep like the fragrant sumac.
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| A rogue cherry tree growing up in the middle of the fragrant sumac. It had to go. |
I was disappointed to find some winter creeper had re-sprouted, so I did have to bring in my sprayer and treat it. This stuff is a nuisance and almost as bad as Japanese honeysuckle. It hides on the earthen floor of shaded forest areas until there's such a large colony of it, and then it takes a lot of effort to get rid of it.
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| Winter creeper - a non-native climbing vine. |
I also managed to do a few small sprays on some of the very small twigs of Autumn Olive that had re-sprouted after Bob's mow.
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| Autumn Olive - a non-native shrub. |
After carefully re-treating the non-native crap, I was able to get my camera out and enjoy all the flowers and the bugs that were landing on them.
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| Pennsylvania Leatherwing and a bumblebee share a flower. |
View from the south - before:
View from the south - after:
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| Goldenrod, New England aster and Indian Grass have now spread into the area we have removed multi-flora rose, Autumn olive, winter creeper, and Eastern red cedar trees. |
View from the north - before:
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| Removed several large Autumn olive bushes in this area, along with multi-flora rose. |
View from the north - after:
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| The bidens and goldenrod are starting to march into their new growing space! |
There were a few people that didn't agree with our approach of removing the Eastern Red cedar trees, but we needed to clear them so that we could have better access to the earthen floor. That's the only way to remove ALL the invasive plants and to have more scattered sunlight for the stuff we'll be planting next fall.
View from the West - before:
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| A large bank of bidens. |
It looks like "Gary" - our resident groundhog - has decided to move in now. Not sure if he's still living here, but he certainly enjoyed the area for a time. And we name all our groundhogs, "Gary", so yeah, we're sure it's "Gary" who moved in.
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| Gary the Groundhog's home. |
I also found a couple of new native plant volunteers - White Vervain, that has started growing since we cleared here! Yay!
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| White Vervain - Verbena urticifolia - native |
And these, "Whirling butterflies"
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| Whirling butterflies - Oenothera lindheimeri - native |
After finding winter creeper and Autumn olive still growing in here, we probably need to wait another season before re-planting with native shrubs. I really want to get everything in this fall, but that would be too risky. Patience grasshopper...patience!
For tracking my progress, I've added links to my videos we've taken of this area as we've progressed.
Persimmon Island - Phase 1 - December, 2021:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9gjH0lJ2RY&t
Persimmon Island - Phase 2 - November, 2022:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzGbzB9XfHg&t
Persimmon Island after clearing everything out during the winter 2022-2023.
https://youtu.be/kVbbQLVKCPM?si=iZVviIRt7eIlyEgS
