| <div class="ck-content"><p>It's getting colder, yup. The leaves have fallen, yup. The maddening sound of leaf blowers fill the air, ugh.</p><p>There are so many things I like about being obsessed with removing invasives, beyond the obvious: healing our planet. These include:</p><ul><li>Living in “tree time." Hard to explain. I will just offer an example. When I cut and kill a massive wisteria or bittersweet vine, the impact does not end with the next growing season. It goes on for years and years, because even if new vines start growing up that tree, it will take <i>years</i> for it to again devastate the crown of the tree. Humans have short life spans. Trees have loooooong life spans (when we don't kill them).</li><li>Experiencing the seasons, directly and close to day-by-day. I am usually outside removing invasives at least 4 days, and sometimes as many as many 6 days, a week. Which means I am right there, up close, to native and invasive plants. So I get to see the new leaves just as they start to unfurl. I watch the leaves change color differently on different trees. I notice which trees lose leaves early, which late. </li><li>To put that another way, the change of seasons has a big impact on what I do. If I was still a full-time software developer, chained to my desk, stuck indoors, staring at a screen, the seasons wouldn't really matter so much. I can do that stuff all year round, regardless of weather, temperature, wind. Since I spend so much time outside, all of that makes an enormous difference in what I can do, and how to do it.</li></ul><p>The seasons - and how plants grow or not in those seasons - matter a lot when it comes to invasives. Anyone who's serious about native ecosystem restoration accepts that we have to use herbicide. For me, this overwhelmingly means "cut-and-paint": cut the tree or shrub at the base, paint the stump with herbicide (thereby minimizing impact on surrounding life). </p><p>More specifically, we apply herbicide to the <a href="https://www.fs.usda.gov/learn/trees/anatomy-of-tree">cambium layer</a>, which is the only part of the trunk that is actually alive (OK, I am simplifying matters a bit, but hey I am no botanist!). Fluids and chemicals (examples: water and chlorophyl) move up and down through this layer. When the herbicide is pulled down to the roots through this layer, it kills the plant.</p><p>A tree's leaves change from green to red or orange or brown because it is sucking the chlorophyl down into the roots for the winter. Come spring, the chlorophyl is sent back up to help the new leaves transform sunlight into food. When a tree (or shrub) is pushing chlorophyl and other chemicals up (during spring), herbicide is not as effective, since relatively little of it will be sent down to the roots. When a plant is dormant, nothing's moving, so applying herbicide is almost certainly doing us no good. </p><p>That's why late summer, full and early winter are the best times to apply herbicide to deciduous plants. So here we are: December 2023, entering winter-time. Autumn olive has pretty much lost all of its leaves, which is why we are going to take a break from cutting it back. Thorny olive, on the other hand, stays green year round, so we can cut and paint that straight through the winter (well, at least if the temperature is above 40F or so). Chinese privet is evergreen or semi-evergreen (it will lose some leaves and thin out). Glossy privet is evergreen. </p><p>In the coming months, we'll be focusing a lot on privet at Brumley South and along Bolin Creek Trail.</p><p>And then there's wisteria. I am currently working in a few different areas that have been devastated by wisteria, with vines that are inches in diameter, have climbed to the top of 40 and 50 ft tall trees, and are killing them. But wisteria is deciduous, its leaves are gone, herbicide will not have an effect. So should I just give wisteria a pass till next fall? <strong>NO WAY!</strong></p><p>The plan for wisteria is to leave the herbicide in the car and instead focus on cutting every vine that is growing up a tree. Usually clearing around a tree is a very time-consuming process. We follow what I call the lollipop effect: cut as high as you can, then pull the vine up along the ground into it heads downward. Cut and paint. Pull the vines away from the tree. That way when new wisteria starts to grow (it's very hard to eradicate entirely), it will not be able to grow right up the dead vines.</p><p>But during the winter, we will simply cut high - and move on, much more rapidly than with the full treatment. This way, everything above the cut, most importantly the thick growth on the crowns of the trees, will die and wither. So come spring, the trees will be free to grow in a way they haven't experinced for years. And we can visit these areas, identify vines we missed - and correct our oversight. Then in the fall, we will return to cut low, paint and make our “lollipops.” :-) </p><p>That was a lot of words. How about a picture or two? Last week, I mentioned that we were going after bittersweet vines along Bolin Creek. Check out this monster vine:</p><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1xE18fPsqAfSGAUZcpe2Gvg4gT76eSvpi" alt="REPLACE" width="300" height="400"></div><p>And here's a before-after from our last olive cut-and-paint for 2023 at Brumley. It's a bit hard to see, but there are a <i>lot </i>of lovely baby native holly growing all through the area. </p><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1uA5_yjQ6BbxYuqVZ9pxk5rJCJFvA04J9" alt="REPLACE" width="800" height="300"></div><h4>Monthly Zoom Call</h4><p>By the way, if you enjoy learning about dealing with invasives, want to get more involved, or just want to learn more, I host a monthly Zoom call every 2nd Thursday at 7 PM with other invasive obsessives. Let me know if you'd like to get invitations to these calls. They are a lot of fun!</p><p> </p></div> |