Eternal Battle Against Woodland Invaders



Yep, all that green stuff is garlic mustard
(this is a photo taken summer 2009, 
when we moved in to our house )

 Yes, the mighty warrior is hurting mightily today.  Every muscle and joint in my body is sore...I can hardly move. Yesterday I decided I'd engage the enemy and renew my seemingly eternal struggle for woodlot supremacy against that infernal invasive, garlic mustard.  After two summers and one spring of fighting a rampant garlic mustard invasion in my backyard, I feel like I'm finally starting to win.

It was relatively warm and the ground was soft due to a recent rain...a perfect time to weed.  I like early spring weeding because the bugs and spiders aren't out in full force yet.  (Nothing creepier than sticking your hand in the crevice of some rotting wood to get a stray weed.  You just KNOW your fingers aren't alone in there.)  Also the mosquitoes aren't out yet so it's actually pleasant to be outside.

Despite reducing the garlic mustard's overall numbers and managing to retake some of the yard, it's still pretty ugly out there.  So, after an initial rush of gut-wrenching panic,  I calmed down and decided to just pick a spot and start pulling.  (I don't want to use herbicide because the garlic mustard is intermingled with native plants I want to keep.)   

This is what Motherwort looks like in April-
when the DNR said it's invasive, they meant it. 
I let one plant go to seed last year
because I thought it was Common Mallow 
and now its EVERYWHERE!

I worked all day (not even stopping for lunch) and was thrilled to see that I only filled one garbage bag of mature plants.  (I also pulled any motherwort and brambles I found but those went into the compost pile) Last spring it was five bags for the same section of yard.  (I'm a big believer in composting, but in the case of garlic mustard I burn it or put it out for the landfill even if it hasn't flowered.  GM is allelopathic and affects soil microorganisms, which wrecks the soil. One study found its negative effects lasted for at least 2 years after it was removed.)




Here is a medium-sized garlic mustard plant (leavs and root). 
They can get MUCH bigger and can flower with only a couple of leaves on them. 
If you look hard you can see all the garlic mustard seedlings around it.

  Unfortunately, I also saw thousands of healthy green sprouts with purple stems everywhere.  EVERYWHERE!  Garlic Mustard seeds can stay alive and dormant in the soil for several years.  So even though I worked tirelessly last year to make sure no GM seeded, there are still plenty of existing seeds in the seed bank.  I plan to hoe down those little guys tomorrow when I'm not so sore.  I was also thinking of trying some GM sprouts in my salad; after all they were originally a food crop.

I also had to stop and think for a moment; GM is a biennial and dies after its second year, so how did I have so many fully mature plants this spring?  Did I really miss that many during my GM-pulling campaigns?  If you don't pull them at the right time (just before they flower) and don't get all the roots, they regrow.  I'm wondering if they are like a biennial salvia I used to grow.  As long as you didn't let it flower and set seed, it acted like a perennial and I had the same plants come back year after year.  Maybe this explains the very fat and healthy GM I found yesterday.  Either that or I'm a sloppy weeder.

Can't wait to see this Hellebore flower

So, anyhow, the battle against GM has started anew and I'm hoping I have the physical prowess to finish the fight.  I'll take this rainy day as a rest day and plan my attack for tomorrow.  Besides, I have some other things to think about.  Like, why were there two wood ducks sitting in a tree in our back yard this morning?  We aren't that close to water. 

How did I manage to plant most of my shrubs in the front yard right on the utility line?  Why didn't I call Digger's Hotline before I planted them?

Also, one of the hellebores I planted last year has some flower buds on it.  When will it flower? I'm pretty excited; I've never seen a hellebore in flower before (except in magazines). 

And, there's new activity in a burrow that we found in our yard last year.  I saw something big out of the corner of my eyes zip into it the other day.  I was pretty sure it was a groundhog (I saw some cream-colored fur) but yesterday I smelled skunk near it.  I hope it's a skunk.  Woodchucks are bad business when it comes to gardening.