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 regrowth from the brush cutting (and some seed expression) that'll require spot spraying later 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 steps of the project, after the invasives have been observably eliminated, will be:

1) seed with an herbaceous seed mix designed with soil, hydrology, sun, and historical natural community in mind, and: 2) initiate silvicultural management of the even aged hardwood pole stand (in particular the large numbers of struggling white ash) to initiate development of old growth characteristics - legacy tree release, selective/variable thinning, small patch cuts, and selecting for only the largest, healthiest ash. Not just because of EAB; the stand is overpopulated with ash, many of which are not healthy and will never thrive, especially in the seasonally saturated clay soil. They'll make great deadfall after the invasives are confirmed gone and contribute to the long term transition to a healthy wet clayplain forest, a process that'll include an ongoing process of planting deer-protected hardwood saplings (red oak, red maple, white pine, pin oak, bur oak, shagbark...). By staggering these plantings over a number of years you (to some degree) replicate patterns of disturbance and regeneration in unmanaged forests, (somewhat paradoxically) intentionally managing for the heterogeneity of age class, species, density, etc. found in unmanaged, older growth woodlands. With any luck, or really with continued commitment and stewardship, in ten years this parcel will be well on its way to a particularly rich, thriving woodland, from soil to crown.