Greensleeves

I returned to Schuetzen Park in Davenport on Saturday and Sunday to pull garlic mustard, the invasive plant that is taking over woodlands. I didn’t have to look hard. Much of it was in bloom, ready to produce billions of seeds.

It is discouraging to see how much there is (and how much I left behind), but I kept telling myself that each plant I pulled was one less that would go to seed.

More hands are needed, though. Many more.

I received a recent email from Scott Killip, branch manager of Seneca Environmental Services, Inc., and a Boy Scout dad who said he is going to try to rally Scouts to the cause.

“I spend a whole lot of time outdoors and understand the depth and seriousness of this invasion,” he said. “This plant can (and has in many areas) dominate and choke out the forest floor and has a very strong possibility of causing extinction to several sensitive floral species.

“While I have pulled lots of these plants myself, it needs the efforts of an army to really get any real control over this stuff. (Eradication is probably impossible at this point.)

“A formidable force would be the Boy Scouts,” Killip said.

“While many groups spend lots of time picking up trash to make things look nice it is not often that you can truly save the environment by staving off potential extinction.”

 Killip raises some very good points. We must keep working on this.

As a P.S. to my personal endeavor, here was an eye-opener: As I worked in my Bettendorf yard on Sunday I noticed, blooming just as happily as you please next to our front porch step, a garlic mus-tard plant!

I pulled it and put it in the trash. But its presence in my very suburban yard shows how this stuff can spread. I’m not sure how the seed got there, but it could have been carried on the bottom of someone’s shoe who was walking in an infested area, and who then cleaned the mud off on the step.

That is why it’s recommended that you remove your shoes after being in any natural area and clean them off (putting the dirt in a bag in the trash) before going to another natural area. That’s because you never know what you might be carrying on the bottoms of your shoes.

Deer don’t clean their feet, but deer also don’t get in a car and drive hundreds of miles to poten-tially spread seeds.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.