Half Acre

Here are before and after pics of a dense honeysuckle, buckthorn, privet, and multiflora rose infestation cleared today by myself and Isaac, the indefatigable brush cutter guy. The fun part was clearing the deadwood that, naturally, lay on top of the privet and honeysuckle throughout. No foliar spraying here (not that there's anything wrong with that...), just cut stump treatment with 20% aquatic formula glyphosate. Ended up clearing about a half acre in a seven hour day, not bad for a two man team. So here's what it looked like when we started:

That's Isaac in the middle, behind the spring bloom of invasives. Here's what it looks like now:

Deadwood and brushpiles are your fiends.

And here's a panoramic perspective:

Yes, this really is the same area as the first image.

A little background: this parcel in general has some of the densest, largest, deadwoodiest invasive growth I've seen. This particular section is regularly wet (the Covington silty clay soil naturally has poor drainage), so the dense, tangled, edge to edge honeysuckle and privet undergrowth are smaller than in the mesic areas and often crushed under deadwood. All this underneath a partial mid-story canopy of medium to very large buckthorn (as shown in the first pic). There will be some limited regrowth from the brush cutting (and some seed expression) that'll need to be cut back once or twice this year, but what you see in the pics is essentially the final product: a transformed landscape thanks to our friends at Stihl, very low doses of herbicide, and hard work.

The next project, after the invasives have been observably eliminated, will be to initiate silvicultural management of the even aged pole stand to initiate old growth characteristics - legacy tree release, selective/variable thinning, small patch cuts, and removing all but the largest, healthiest ash. Not just because of EAB; the stand is overpopulated and in particular with ash, many of which are not healthy and will never thrive. They'll make great deadfall after the invasives are confirmed gone, and contribute to the transition to a healthy wet clayplain forest.