Pulling Invasive Plants at Pine Lake; It Don't Come Easy.

We had gotten reports that the entry to the Recreation Path at Pine Lake was getting choked down with plant growth and poison ivy.  This is one of the spots that we mow every year, usually in June, but this year it's in May.  There were a lot of invasive plants among the weeds, including Garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed, Mugwort, and others.  Normally we cut these areas, but this year we tried pulling out some of the plants and bagging them for disposal elsewhere to see if that was a better method.

Ellen, Mike & Graham are bending over and pulling the whole Garlic mustard plant out by the roots and then bagging it prior to cutting.  That way the plant can't go to seed and create more Garlic mustard plants next year (we hope).  

For more on why Garlic mustard is so pernicious (a solid Scrabble word), and how to control it, visit the Univ. of Penn.'s Invasive Webpage here.  The plant sprouts a bazillion seeds earlier than everything else and takes over every square inch of disturbed bare soil.  Not a good plant.  But it's edible, so feel free to pick some, take it home, and cook it up.

Mike McGee is ripping up the Garlic Mustard.   He got the memo on wearing long sleeves near the poison ivy, but had shorts.  Hopefully he showered well later.  He was organizing a litter pick up later in the day.

Did I mention that the weather was freakishly pushing 90 degrees and high humidity while we were wearing long pants, long shirts, high boot, gloves and other containment gear while working in Poison Ivy?  It was wonderful.  It was hot and sweaty work.

Here's some of the Japanese knotweed that we pulled.  It rained Friday night so some of the plants actually were easy to pull up.  The trouble is that any root fragments left behind will re-sprout.  But if your don't try you never win.  So anything we pulled out now will be less junk to deal with later in the year.

Bill Dyer cut out the Wheeler Street Access Trail.  It comes out between the Senior Center and the Police Department, but it often looks like a jungle until we get around to it.  This year Bill got it early so it should be easier for people to find.

There was a bunch of Mugwort around the entrance to cut.  Hopefully this makes it more accessible to local residents accessing the trail off Wheeler Street.

While pulling out the weeds we had a lot of customers, walking, jogging, and biking past.  There seemed to be a lot of shaggy dogs taking their humans out for a walk before it got too hot.  Sometimes you were working quietly pulling weeds and when you look up you see some of the residents out using the trail.

Hello Deer.  

About 20 feet away this little buck in velvet was wondering what the heck I was up to on his trail.  

We had a nice little discussion about why doesn't he just eat the Garlic mustard, until he decided to amble off toward the Police Department.  You see a lot of interesting things when you're quiet along the trails.

 

So, we ripped up more invasives down toward Meadow Street.  We ran out of garbage bags to contain the junk and had to come back on Sunday.  The plants and seeds can't be just thrown off in the woods or they'll just re-sprout and you'll have an even worse problem.  So the roots and seeds have to go to a landfill or incinerator or some type of Black Hole to get rid of them.

 

A large number of bags were left at the trailhead on Saturday, with more on Sunday on Meadow St.  We contacted Shelton's Highway and Bridges Department to ask them to haul them away.

Once you get rid of the invasives you can start to see the native plants along our open spaces.  Here's a Jack in the Pulpit along the RecPath where it was covered by a carpet of Garlic Mustard.

Here's a Cinnamon fern under the pine trees that doesn't have to compete with knotweed any more.

And we even had birds nesting in the bird house a the trailhead kiosk.  It was a good, if hot and sweaty weekend.  Lot's of people using the RecPath with less invasives, a wider Path, and less poison ivy.

After.  It's not glamorous, but then maintenance never is.  Thanks to Graham, Bill, Mike, Ellen, Matt & Terry for coming out today.

Elsewhere, Teresa was working on Eklund Native Species Garden, and Mark and Bob were working on French's Hill.  People were busy all over the City this weekend fixing up trails in some hot and sticky weather.   Enjoy the week ahead.

Removing invasive species is a lot of tough work; It Don't Come Easy.   A song by a certain composer named Ringo (and his pal George) was going my head.  Or maybe it just trying to think of something  cooler.

 

Paugussett Bypass at Wiacek

We met on a surprisingly muggy Saturday to finish clearing along the Paugussett Bypass at the Wiacek Open Space.  The Bypass had been cleared as earlier work parties and an Eagle Scout project earlier in the year, but like everywhere else had grown back, especially at the powerline crossing.  One of the goals was to clear enough to see if we could get the DR Mower thru for maintenance mowing.

Starting at Constitution Blvd. N. we dove into the barberry thickets cleared by the scouts.  Val, Jim, and Paul cut, whittled, and dug out various saplings, shoots and clumps to make the trail and tread more passable.

One of the challenges is the thick barberry grows in clumps, and the sections that stuck up were tripping hazards.  So we tried using the Pullerbear weed wrench to remove the clumps.

The weed wrench is a heavy steel bar with a jaw and fulcrum welded at the bottom.  In theory, you clamp the jaws on the stem of what you want to pull out and then push down on the handle.  In this case, because the barberry was cut low it was tough to get a good bite with the jaws without tearing the root ball up.  Progress was slow.

After pulling most of the roots out we tried burning the rest with a weed torch.

Careful not to let the fire spread to the leaves, the torch seemed to work well.  Most invasive species require multiple treatments, and barberry is susceptible to burning.  Should bring a fire extinguisher or water bucket next time, don't want to start any California-scale brush fires.

Above is a section of the trail after pulling and burning.  It's slow progress.  Need to have teams of 2-3 people digging, pulling and burning next time.  If we can get one person to loosen the root clump with a mattock, the another to rip it out with the Pullerbear, then somebody to burn the remaining roots, I think it would be more productive.

But we got out and made some progress.  Thanks to Paul, Val, Jim & Terry for helping out.  And thanks to Royal Bakery for the great doughnuts; a weekend special.

The next work party is at Lane Street in a week or so - check the work party page for further details.  Come out and enjoy the Hawley Meadow along Means Brook in Huntington Center.

Burning Barberry (Without getting the Fire Dept Angry)

It all started with wanting to mow some hay.

We had been really busy this Spring with construction of the RecPath, and fell behind in some of our maintenance tasks. At our June meeting we decided to mow the Paugussett Trail at the Wiacek open space between Constitution Blvd. North and Meadow Street. The trail runs along the edge of a hay field & the trail gets really obscured in late Spring.

Problem was, we couldn't get our DR Mower into the field because the Trail had been turned into a soupy mudhole at the powerlines. One of the volunteers for Shelton Clean Sweep had good in there with his pickup truck to pull out a big pile of garbage this Spring, and given all the rain that we had got stuck. So he backed out and tried again, and again, and again. Long Story Short - Mike got the garbage (nice work, single-handed) but our trail access was a mess for getting our mower into the meadow. So we were going to use some extra millings from a City road improvement project (we love recycling) to fill in the mudholes, but we though the millings wouldn't look quite right & had access to other materials.

The new Community Garden #2 at 279 Soundview Avenue had LOTS of rocks and dirt available. All looking very natural and good for filling in mudholes, the question was how to get from the Paugussett Trail over to Soundview? We knew there were old woods roads between the trail and the Community Garden and thought that we could just drive between the two with the Gator, get the rocks, fill the hole & problem solved.

So Rich Mudlarks walked the route with his trusty GPS. Unfortunately for him he walked had to walk thru a sea of Japanese Barberry while wearing his shorts. Needless to say he emerged bloody looking like a cross between someone trapped in a tight cage with a grumpy bobcat, or an early-bird shopper on the day after Thanksgiving.

The Japanese Barberry is an invasive non-native species that has thorns and spreads out everywhere when there are a lot of deer. They eat everything else but leave the barberry - which happens to form an ideal habitat for ticks. So, armed with the knowledge that we had to cut thorns we scheduled a quick work party & brought various tools of destruction.

Here's Jim & Rich clearing out a patch. We have a new Ryobi with a sickle bar attachment that works well for cutting this stuff. Trouble is it grows over rocks and stumps and you can't always see what your cutting until you hit it. The Stihl brushcutter with the plastic vanes works well here also - if you nip a rock you haven't dulled up a blade. Janice, Lynn, Bill, Terry, Jim & Rich all had a hand in cutting and hauling rocks. Once we cleared out a path thru the barberry the guys went up to the Garden, got a lot of rocks, and when back to fill in the mud holes.

In the meantime we tried out the new Trails Flamethrower to burn the barberry after we cut it. This is supposed to be the preferred way to permanently eradicate this invasive species. Here's Rich trying to see how long his has to aim the flames at his foot before his boot catches on fire. It had rained a lot that week so there was no danger (well, limited danger) of us setting the woods on fire. Come to find out that we were doing things correctly for a change & this is a good method for getting rid of barberry (and ticks) - see the article in The New London Day.

So meanwhile the guys were trying to fill in the mud holes with the rocks, however the rocks were going back to China and we still had lots of mud holes.

After a while the crew gave up and punched a hole through a dryer section of a hedge instead.

Several hundred pounds of rocks were moved, but no fingers, toes, or backs were lost in the process. We didn't do exactly what we originally planned, but we did finish with a dry passage for the Mower, we did not set the woods on fire, we did put a small dent in some invasive species, and we did the clearing the the Soundview Ave. Neighborhood Access Trail that was one of our 2011 Goals, so it was a productive if somewhat long & hot day.

One of our goals this year is to create a number of neighborhood access trails so more people can enjoy the trails network.

The next Paugussett Trail Work Party will be this Saturday 7/9. Meet at 8:30 at The Maples parking lot on Indian Well Road and we'll work uphill from the Park. Wonder what we'll find on that end.