Site Discussions

A local nature center recently took up the task of trying to eradicate the Autumn Olive that had overrun the landscape there so it could be restored to its natural environment.  They did an impressive job, cutting most of it out, but are left with unsightly stumps everywhere.  After learning about their project I identified many Autumn Olive plants on my property and new ones growing as well.  I am planning to try and rid myself of them if at all possible.  Any advise on how to proced would be great.

Autumn olive is an excellent wild edible.  I do not discourage it on my property—I harvest it.  I use the berries to make an excellent jelly.  Friends of mine use them to make delicious fruit leather, sauces, and juices.  They are rich in the phytochemical lycopene, which may help prevent cancer.

My chickens love the berries.  The berry-laden branches that I throw into the chicken yard cause a veritable feeding frenzy.  The chickens enjoy them from late summer, when they are just beginning to turn red, until they are gone in November.  This is a long season of a wild and nutritious treat for them.

After the leaves fall, my rabbits love the twigs and bark.  I harvest autumn olive branches for them all winter long.  They like them almost as much as they like apple twigs.

Maybe someday someone will breed autumn olive to create a less aggressive bush that produces larger, sweeter berries, to appeal to the consumer.  Will that be better?  I’m not so sure.  I figure it’s fine to just harvest them from the wild.  Yes, the plant has changed the habitat, perhaps for the worse, but it’s probably better than a chemically maintained monoculture, which is where most of our food comes from.  The more autumn olive I eat, the less I eat from those monocultures.  It’s local, too!

One can think of autumn olive as invasive, but one could also think of it as a terrific food plant that requires no chemical assistance to bear well.

Tree roots grow, and many times pipes are made of clay.  Strong growing roots easily permeate clay.  The roots will not just enter that one spot; they have the potential to be surrounding the pipe.  One solution is to replace the outdated materials (disintegrating clay) of yesterday with schedule #17 pipe.  The roots growing back in two weeks is no different than toilet paper clogging a drain in two weeks time.  Both are barriers, and a stronger barrier is the solution.

Growing up on Cape Cod, pitch pine will always be a favorite species. On the Outer Cape (where soil is literally nonexistent), the tree still dominates, forming vast barrens of gnarled, stubby trees underscored by beds of needles and tufts of wispy grass. The smell of these forests is salty and unmistakable, and primal. Alas! These beautiful forests have reverted to sickly looking mixtures of white and scarlet oak, red maple, and nonnatives over much of the rest of the Cape. Pitch pine is a tree that’s not often paid attention to, but I think it’s beautiful in its own hunched, forlorn sort of way. Thanks.

I’m a native Cape Codder and can offer some perspective on what an area can come to look like after nonnatives have had centuries to settle in. On my parents’ 4 and 1/2 acre plot I’ve noted the following: ailanthus, common privet, 2 types of barberry, vine and bush honeysuckles, buckthorn, multiflora and rugosa rose, oriental bittersweet, Norway and sycamore (pseudoplanatus) maples, garlic mustard, wineberry, knotweed, butterfly bush, burning bush, phragmites, wisteria, and Russian (but not autumn) olive. Fraxinus Excelsior (European ash) is also becoming surprisingly aggressive. Now it appears that some of the more aggressive nonnatives (bittersweet and multiflora rose in particular) are actually pushing out the other invasives.

Anyone who wishes to see what New England will look like after another hundred years of inaction on this issue should take a look at the Cape. The open land here (what remains) is fairly devoid of ecological or economic function. Thanks for bringing up the issue. It’s more important (dare I say dire?) than most people think.

Oh, and I forgot about porcelainberry. It resembles grape vine, to which it is related. Beware!

Our tree farm’s major invasives are buckthorn, multiflora, Japanese barberry, and autumn olive. We have a lovely colony of fringed gentian that pops their beautiful blue flowers up in late September and bloom undaunted through a frost or two. Into this treasured area crept autumn olive. I didn’t notice it until they got knee high. I mowed them the first couple of years after the gentians went to sleep for the winter. However, the olives came back stronger. Thus, I brought in the backhoe and dug each one up and burned them the following spring. They’re gone from that spot, but lurk elsewhere on the property. I’m merely corraling my invasives, but I think I’m having some affect.

Virginia:

Other species of once (December 1969) recommended “wildlife plantings” (by the USDA Soil Conservation Service or “SCS”) were Tartarian and Amur Honeysuckle. I came across the pamplet (PA-940) while going through old files. As a retired USDA Forest Service biologist, I wonder how much of the “expert advice” we have given (like stocking various fishes all over the world) has had unintended deleterious consequences.

I have wonderfully vigorous stands of the tartarian honeysuckle and purple loosestrife on the farm here that the SCS cost-shared to plant and that NRCS is now cost-sharing with me to eradicate! I am engaged in trench warfare as (“Dr. Death” with the Roundup) each year. So far all I am able to accomplish (after about five years of pretty intense battles) is a modicum of control. I dont’ think eradication is feasible with current technologies!

Sincerely Sadder but Wiser,

Paul Brouha

My nemisis is oriental bittersweet. Since my teens I have been roaming forests from Pennsylvania to Maine clipping and yanking the cursed stuff. Once you get an eye for it, you will see it is almost everywhere, and no wonder, birds love it. So do some well meaning people who make decorative wreaths from berry laden stems. Unknowingly, they introduce the vine into their gardens and hedgerows. At that point, it can be easy to pull up and stop the spread, but most people are oblivious to the small plants. Once established, it is quite tedious to entirely remove. A job well beyond most gardeners’ attention spans or ability.

Clipping provides immediate gratification in the battle against the onslaught, but it sprouts right back from the stump and sends up shoots from the roots, which may range far from the stump. Occasionally, sawing a very old (40 years or so) specimen will blessedly kill it outright. Pulling the vine right out of the ground is effective, but backbreaking, as well as near impossible once the stem has become established. Herbicides work, but are beyond my means outside of a spot application.

To me, these vines are unsightly parasites, twisting, bending and strangling everything in their path. They may be an economic problem as well. A cut-over wood lot not far from mine may never regenerate into anything resembling a forest, as no tree or shrub can out compete this plague.

What invasive burdens are others bearing?

I have a Norway maple on my conscience.

(And a house loaded with windows that birds keep trying to fly through!)

Where can I find detailed directions on how to eradicate buckthorn, honeysuckle, and wild rose?  cjf

Virginia,

I go to great lengths to locate stands of Japanese knotweed so that I can pick it and eat it fresh and also use as the main ingredient in a wonderful chutney recipe.

I find that it spreads slowly when left alone, but when, say, the highway department renews a roadside ditch, the knotweed has a heyday.

Anyway, I figure knotweed needs an apologist and I seem to fit the bill…

Tom

Southwestern Michigan is over-run with the stuff. AND with garlic mustard.  AND with buckthorn. AND other invasives as well.

I have a large woodland farm, conservation easements all in possession of the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy, and the garlic mustard may be more insidious and invidious than the autumn olive; soon the autumn olive will be blooming, and the sweetest perfume one can imagine will float down the hills on warm late spring evenings and invade our bedroom, and will be so lovely that one can momentarily, at least, think good thoughts about it.  But there is nothing good to think about garlic mustard: it supposedly can be eaten, but only once a year.  And one can make enough for two or three meals by pulling up maybe two plants.  And Roundup doesn’t work very well on it.  One’s perservance is not reward, and one’s age doesn’t stop advancing: pulling gets harder and harder as the years go by.  Each plant one misses spreads some 4000 seeds upon ripening, and those seeds are viable in the earth for up to seven years.  [Fire seems to offer some relief; or terrible drought.  Nothing else.  Nothing. Pulling only keeps it at bay.]

We have many deer on our property, and they don’t like the stuff any more than I do.

TCB

I bought a house with AO growing on it, they bought it for the turkeys. I spent 5 years cutting, hacking and mowing. When I sold the place, I warned the new owners about not letting it get out of control.

The people I bought the place from must have loved invasives; in addition to the AO they had cypress spurge, rosa rugosa, and burning bush. Not on the list but uncontrolled mint and tansy were growing in several gardens. They’re out there.

inoculated logs last spring. lots of mycilium showing on logs and bark splitting in spots. theres a few very small shrooms starting to pop. temps are in 60’s day,30’s night. what is the optimum temp. to force these logs to fruit. could i bring them inside after soaking?

“Whoever doesn’t like the smoke needs to move back to the city and inhale the smog there. Burning wood does not produce harmful gasses into the air.” 

Respectfully, did you take a close look at the Comparison chart up above?  Living in the vicinity of someone who heats with a poorly engineered or improperly operated wood burner can quickly turn your life into pure misery.  There’s not just the persistent stink, which can’t be kept out of the most tightly sealed house; for many people—such as adults and children with asthma, older people with cardiovascular issues, etc—there can be very serious health consequences. 

In my suburban area of Northwest Indiana, the uncontrolled spread of wood burners is becoming an epidemic.  There’s little or no regulation.  I’ll probably soon be driven out of the area I’ve lived in for 35 years, because it’s hard for someone with asthma to live all winter under a ground-hugging blanked of air pollution. 

Why would anyone think they have a right to foul the air above everyone else’s property line?

Just a note to say that ticks are active for longer periods than some information suggests. We have found ticks on people and dogs every month of the year except January and February. The dogs get ticks in a fenced and mowed yard. There are mole and shrews in evidence. Perhaps those critters are the source.

‘Only eight [...] walkingstick species are found in North America.’ Actually, it’s about 30.

Growing up in Orange, Vermont, back in the 50’s, I took an early interest in the birds.  This was due in part to having a father that taught me at an early age the names of some of the birds that shared the farm with us.  For several years I kept a written record of what day in the spring the earliest birds reappeared after a long winter.  Interestingly the red-winged blackbirds arrived within 2 to 3 days of the same date each year - between the 3rd and 5th of March, regardless of the weather.

You captured the feel of spring with great accuracy…up north I did get one more run of some really rich syrup making on Good Friday…but then I pulled my taps.  It was 85 degrees and it just isn’t that much fun hanging out around a fire.  Guess that’s what the moose thought too, the one who left tracks right up to one of my buckets and knocked it down, pulling tap and all out of the tree.  Moose and I are ready for spring beauties and trout lilies, i guess.

Lovely essay. Captures the sense of things just right.

Except for one detail: 4 months of winter? Not in these parts! Even though it was light compared to other winters, I count six!