It’s cold. Actually cold, not kinda sorta cold, or just below freezing, or 45º today and 25º tomorrow ‘cold.’ No, it’s cold, ten degrees at noon and going down into the negatives tonight, something we hardly see at all anymore in Vermont, especially below 1500 feet in the balmy valleys. No, thanks to climate change the long, cold, hard Vermont winters of yore are long gone, a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean it’s not cold. It is. Cold. And - you guessed it - a great time for taking out large woody stemmed invasive species, especially on wetter sites where the ground is now frozen solid. I’m currently working in exactly this kind of area, a literal buckthorn and honeysuckle swamp that’s not just wet most of the growing season, but nearly impassable with branches, canes, undergrowth, deadwood, and of course wall to wall honeysuckle, privet, multiflora rose, and buckthorn. In the single digits of mid-winter it’s still a thick tangle of deadfall and deadwood and happy happy invasives of all shapes and sizes, many tipped over when the soil was soft and wet but still alive and growing and reaching up towards the bright blue (very cold) sky.
There’s only one way to take this kind of mess on (okay, sure, there are a bunch of ways, but if you want to remove and clear the invasives without destroying the substrate and everything else and/or spraying pounds - yes, pounds - of chemicals, this is it). You wade in and start cutting. Okay, not exactly. As the wise man said, you got to have a plan. And indeed you do. In this case, in order to get this really challenging site done with some kind of ecological sensitivity, at a reasonable cost, and in real time, you have to deploy the right tools and strategies in the most efficient way (and, of course, deploy your own hard work). Which in this case goes something like this:
In order to drop and disassemble the many, many (did I say many?) buckthorn you need open space, which means taking out the numerous understory honeysuckle (and in this case privet) of varying sizes. A high horsepower brushcutter with a sharp blade makes short work of this, including cutting the larger stems and branches into pileable pieces (see previous post on your good friend, the brush pile). And as on this site I’m using a low-dose herbicide strategy, I immediately follow cutting with 20% aquatic glyphosate cut stem treatment using a small spray bottle, a fast, efficient, highly precise and targeted application that uses very small amounts of herbicide with no drift and almost no overspray.
Once the honeysuckle (and privet, and multiflora rose) are cut, piled, and out of the way, it’s buckthorn time. My trusty Stihl eats buckthorn for breakfast, lunch, and a late afternoon snack - this is the fun stuff, where I get to pretend I’m Paul Bunyan dropping 100’ spruce in the great north woods. (Realty check - I’m really just trying to not kill or maim myself.) But dropping, limbing, and bucking the ‘thorns goes much quicker once the field is cleared for landing. The obvious theme here is efficiency. Sure, the landowner could bring in the skid-steers and chip everything to the ground, or basal bark and foliar spray everything in sight leaving an edge to edge, impassable tangle of dead mid- and understory biomass (which would also be something of a fire hazard…). These are efficient, real world options that have real advantages. But what if you apply the same ideas of efficiency, especially efficiencies of scale, to ecologically sensitive removal and management of invasive species? Answer: you get transformation of effectively “dead zones” of invasive choked landscape to rapid recovery of native natural communities and landscapes in real time, with minimal disturbance, at cost competitive rates.
The final step in the above scenario will be followup spot spraying and brushcutting of regrowth after a month or two of spring leaf-out. After that, and with very low-intensity maintenance, what you have is a nearly 100% changed ecosystem in which native tree, shrub, and herbaceous species will rapidly populate into self organizing systems of emergent natural communities; in which soils degraded by invasive induced changes and deficits in chemistry, nutrients, mycorrhizal development, microorganisms, and microbial activity return to bioactive richness; and where an effective “food desert” for insect and arthropod populations - especially Lepidoptera - will be replaced by native species that support these taxa, and everything that relies on them for food and ecosystem services.
This is what “ecologically sensitive” means to me - to turn these degraded landscapes around to functional ecosystems as fast as possible, with the least possible amount of damaging mechanical and/or chemical disturbance, as affordably as possible. Changing the world, one parcel at a time.
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