Success battling invasives without chemicals!

*knocks on wood to avoid jinxing self*

Just wanted to share some successes and discoveries as I work to remove the multiflora rose, garlic mustard, morrow's honeysuckle, thistles, japanese barberry and oriental bittersweet!

I moved here 2 years ago (5a, northern catskills) and I only started learning what was invasive and troublesome late last year. I am lazy, and I don't want to use any chemicals on the land, but I've seen some great success so far on the invasives, and wanted to share in case its helpful to anyone else!

What you need:
-A pair of gardening gauntlets (long gloves; there are good vegan options available--not as good as leather, but I've been happy with them!)
-Electric pruning shears (I've been using the dewalt one, but there are other ones on amazon that are probably much lighter, and I've heard good things)
-The seek or inaturalist app (both free) to check identifications of plants until you are confident!
-An attitude that you are not going for total scorched earth eradication, just making some space for more natives and diversity! Quit each day while you're still having fun, so you'll look forward to coming back. This was key to making it a fun project!

This is what I've done, and the results so far!

In early spring I waited for the invasives to start leafing out; in my area, they come in before everything else, which makes them easy to identify as they appear! This is also the perfect time because it's cool outside and there are no biting bugs yet! Just put on a thick sweatshirt and gloves and go for a stomp about to see what's around. This is the order of what I tackled in my area, starting in about March/April:

Multiflora Rose: The first to show up in my area: Big arching thorny canes with downward hooked thorns. These catch on EVERYTHING so have your gloves and long sleeves on. Just start cutting small sections and leaving the branches right there on the ground; work your way back bit by bit, until you cut it down to the ground level. I find lots of smaller cuts make it much less thorny, and much less likely that the branches will stick to you when you step back. If you have a big section caught on your clothes, just snip it into a couple of smaller pieces and it will fall off or come off easily--it's the big pieces with those fishhook thorns grabbing from multiple angles that get ya. Don't worry about the roots. Yes they will resprout. But hopefully something else will take over instead; if not, you can cut it back again (it definitely won't be as big). Leave the roots in place to feed the soil/help with erosion. Leave the branches on top in a pile for the same reason, and to create wildlife habitat. It also helps shade out the regrowth that will want to come up from the roots. Results so far: tons of different natives closed in wherever the multiflora rose was. Anything that was growing in the areas have just happily taken back the space, gray dogwoods, cherries, lilacs, grapes, virginia creeper, rose mallow, buttonbush, and goldenrods have filled in naturally very quickly this spring and early summer.

Morrow's Honeysuckle and Hybrids This came next! It leafs out and flowers super early so has been taking over hedgerows and windbreaks. The birds and animals love it, and it is on some steep slopes, so I didn't want to go scorched earth with removal, so I just did the same thing with cutting back and making GIANT brush piles on top of the stumps. Don't worry about being perfect. Just cut down as far as you can go, try to get all the branches with leaves, and leave in a pile. I left all the roots because I don't want to destabilize the soil. I then planted some bare root hazelnuts in front of the stumps on the "sunny side"). I was going to plant some grasses, but raspberries and a bunch of other grasses (some native, some not, came up). I'm leaving them alone for this season to stabilize the slope while the hazelnuts (hopefully!) take root. On the non sloped areas, gray dogwoods, goldenrods, and all of the other usual suspects have happily taken their space. I removed about 50% of it this year, and will plan to get the other half next year--birds were using it this spring, so I didn't want to take it all at once.

Japanese Barberry: Tons of patches of this in wooded areas. At first I was ripping out the roots with a weed wrench, which was fun, but hard work. Then I just started clipping and dropping on top of the leaves/mulch in the woods. This one is the fastest to sprout back, but it sticks out like a sore thumb on the forest floor. I made a second pass just for little new shoots that were sticking up a couple of weeks ago. It's a "fast grower" but in human time it's pretty slow--casually clipping with a cup of coffee in hand a couple of times of year seems to do the job.

Oriental Bittersweet: This stuff is everywhere--but again, once you get to know what it looks like it's easy to spot. Right now it's sticking it's arching vines up from patches of understory, so I just either pull it and leave it where it is if they are young plants (I haven't had an issue with re-rooting so far), or cut back to the ground if it's a big plant. I had HUGE plants strangling trees (where the trunks were bulging because they were being constricted so badly) that I was able to cut down and pull back. I also had messes where it had created huge heaps/nests over other piles of fallen brush and trees, entangling with grapevines and sumac. I just followed the bittersweet as far as I could reach, clipped, and let the grapevines take it from there. It has already gone from 70% bittersweet 30% grape to 90% grape 10% bittersweet! Use those strong competitors to your advantage! With bigger tangles, just cut what you can reach, then come back! It's easier to see what you still need to do once you give the foliage a few days to dry up/die so you can see what you've already cut, and what's still hanging on.

Bull Thistle: I almost took these and the great mullin last fall when I found out they are invasive--I'm glad I didn't! Both of these plants are growing where nothing else is, the birds and bugs love them, and they aren't reproducing quickly. They just quietly reappeared this year, in new spots, and if I'm ever ready to take them down, they are biennial and easy to catch before they flower. But they both look cool and are wildlife magnets--I hypothesize that they are just filling the niche of some of our native thistles that are missing from our ecosystem, so I appreciate they are standing in! I plan to introduce some native thistles when/if I can in the future, but these guys have been surprisingly welcome "invasives"!

Creeping Thistle: I just discovered one of these, but I haven't decided what (if anything) to do about it. For now I'm just watching to see how it behaves, since it's in the middle of a blackberry and milkweed patch, I'm guessing it can't get too crazy too fast (I hope).

Garlic Mustard: I have a few patches of this--one on the steep hillside, and one in a woodsy clearing. For the hillside, I just pulled a lot of the plants (or just the flower heads) before they went to seed this year, and again, wasn't worried about perfection. That seems to have worked well--a few plants still hanging out, but white ash and chokecherry are taking their spots. I was dreading heading to the wood clearing, because it looked overwhelming there this spring, but when I went to look at the patch it was completely covered in White Snakeroot and giant goldenrod instead! I'm thinking garlic mustard forged the way, and now we've moved to bigger plants, so I'm going to try to encourage succession to some new plants in that area and see if we can just shade it out before next spring.

Wanted to share some hope and plant replacement ideas with any other fellow lazy gardeners--non-stop mowing/cutting and chemicals are not your only options! Would love to hear any other success stories of using succession to battle invasives (or embracing the niches that "invasives" are filling for us without our knowledge!)

Thank you for sharing what you done that works.

Also there is garden vinegar which is useful to control weeds, adjust soil pH, and even act as a natural insecticide or pest repellent.

https://gardenprofessors.com/vinegar-a-garden-miracle/

I am in agreement with all the methods you wrote about. Especially this:

“ An attitude that you are not going for total scorched earth eradication, just making some space for more natives and diversity! ”

I don’t believe in invasive species being bad or inferior and think much of the hate is just hate with some shaky science to back it up. Actually working with the land, we get to see how honeysuckle feeds the birds and provides life saving medicine; how multiflora rose sustains the chickadees and other birds through the winter, and protects the long abused soils, garlic mustard is such a good nutritious food, and so on and so forth. But we also see how the thriving life of the ecosystem is impacted negatively when these plants form monocultures or when native plants are excluded.

One rule of mine is if the plant doesn’t get hyper invigorated by the weeding, cutting, digging or pulling, then they are done, their work is coming to an end, and the ecosystem is in a good place and evolving in a direction towards diversity. If they do really jump back, then they haven’t done their work yet and need a little more time.

It has been my experience that when we see them and love them for who they are, the immigrant species come into balance. It takes work but eventually there is a splendor and diversity of thriving life that we are part of and essential to. Each of these plants is here for a reason and that reason likely is us, in both senses of the statement…

Again I don’t want to take away from this thread, as I completely agree with your approach to things!

Sounds like challenging weeds. My main weed is Tradescantia fluminensis, common here in New Zealand introduced from South America as a house plant. It is amazing it does not set seed here but finds its way everywhere seemingly impossible. I see it as a bit of an ally. It doesnt usually grow higher than a few feet, and suppresses almost all other weeds, such as dreaded vines, most of the time, forming a dense carpet or ground cover. So I just plant crops taller than it, it keeps the soil in place until I'm ready to plant something. Most people spend half their lives pulling it and, and loose their topsoil.

Lesves also edible cooked but this is very rarely reported.

Maybe I am lucky I have a weed that can worked around and worked with but maybe this can be done more often witb other weeds than many think. Social constraints are an issue, many people's lives here are devoted to killing this plant, I have a very private section do have not been burnt at the stake by neighbors.

Good advice.
Further, ~15000 y ago the Catskills were under a glacier.
Every species is an 'invasive' on some timescale.
Outside the Congo and Amazon watersheds there are few truly ancient landscapes.

Thank you for the tips, especially the apps, I have been thinking about getting a plant ID app and wasn't sure which to go with.

While every plant may be 'introduced" at some level, as in it didn't evolve in that region thousands or millions of years ago, that doesn't make it invasive.  Even plants that were introduced recently from afar are not necessarily invasive, even ones that naturalize- if they don't displace native plants- and I think much of the unhappiness about invasives has to do with how they aggressively outcompete the plants we use and are challenging to remove, more so than a locavore attitude problem.  Certain plants take over and outcompete everything else, and some of these offer little value to wildlife or humans, which is why they can often outcompete the natives and leave us with substantially less biodiversity.  Some do offer a lot of value as food or medicine, but still may change wetlands into dry areas or have other consequences that change the ecosystem and mean an end to other plants and possibly animal species getting to be in that space too.  
Maybe we need to label the plants we have a problem with as nuisances instead of invasives? so it's clear it isn't just the fact that they come from somewhere else.  This isn't an antiimmigrant attitude, but practicality.  And I get that some natives can become nuisances, and what is invasive in one ecosystem won't become invasive in another.  I plant daffodils and other non-native flower species, but I try to check that they won't take over the space the way an invasive will.  

Dandelions may pop up all over the place, but they don't take over and I'm happy people introduced them many years ago and they are now a common plant that people and animals can eat.    I am ok with things that don't grow over my vegetable and flower gardens at a super fast pace like Creeping Charlie will and the effort to control it never ends and gardening is so much more effort because of it.  If I don't cut back the multiflora rose every year I will have no more meadows to walk through and that would be a bummer.    It's not the fact that they come from some place else that I want them gone, they make the land less useable for me and are a lot of effort to keep cutting back that I'd rather put toward other projects.  

Jolene Csakany wrote:Thank you for the tips, especially the apps, I have been thinking about getting a plant ID app and wasn't sure which to go with.  

Definitely check out the Seek app! It's made by the same (I think non-profit) as inaturalist, and it's awesome. Just keep trying different angles of the camera until it gets to species, then take a pic. It saves all of your pics/observations so you know when you discover something new, and it identifies animals, insects, and fungi too. It feels like a more fun version of pokemon go--collecting species in real life! And if you really get into it, you can connect it to inaturalist and contribute your observations to citizen science projects!

Jolene Csakany wrote:While every plant may be 'introduced" at some level, as in it didn't evolve in that region thousands or millions of years ago, that doesn't make it invasive.  Even plants that were introduced recently from afar are not necessarily invasive, even ones that naturalize- if they don't displace native plants- and I think much of the unhappiness about invasives has to do with how they aggressively outcompete the plants we use and are challenging to remove, more so than a locavore attitude problem.  

I love this thought--and the idea that they are "introduced" like you would at a party. Just because they're new doesn't mean they can't be a cool and welcome addition to the group. Although some guests can walk the line--they might start out as a good time, and end up a sloppy mess passed out on the lawn.

David Nicholls wrote:Sounds like challenging weeds. My main weed is Tradescantia fluminensis, common here in New Zealand introduced from South America as a house plant. It is amazing it does not set seed here but finds its way everywhere seemingly impossible. I see it as a bit of an ally. It doesnt usually grow higher than a few feet, and suppresses almost all other weeds, such as dreaded vines, most of the time, forming a dense carpet or ground cover. So I just plant crops taller than it, it keeps the soil in place until I'm ready to plant something. Most people spend half their lives pulling it and, and loose their topsoil.

Lesves also edible cooked but this is very rarely reported.

Maybe I am lucky I have a weed that can worked around and worked with but maybe this can be done more often witb other weeds than many think. Social constraints are an issue, many people's lives here are devoted to killing this plant, I have a very private section do have not been burnt at the stake by neighbors.

I love that--how are you planting the taller crops? Do you just poke seeds in between, or clear small patches, or just throw a handful of seed and cross your fingers? (I'm crossing my fingers that you can just throw a handful of seeds!)

Isn't it bananas how much of this is tied to social constraints? I have definitely rehearsed in my head what I would say to the neighbors should I get the side eye about my thistle + mullen! It reminds me of teeth whitening--a whole lot of time/cost, counter productive and damaging, but we're all just a bunch of apes!

Laurie Fen wrote:
Isn't it bananas how much of this is tied to social constraints? I have definitely rehearsed in my head what I would say to the neighbors should I get the side eye about my thistle + mullen! It reminds me of teeth whitening--a whole lot of time/cost, counter productive and damaging, but we're all just a bunch of apes!

If you want to be healthy, eat nettles.

If you want to have green teeth… eat nettles.

Douglas Campbell wrote:Good advice.
Further, ~15000 y ago the Catskills were under a glacier.
Every species is an 'invasive' on some timescale.
Outside the Congo and Amazon watersheds there are few truly ancient landscapes.

Yes; thank you! Even the invasive earthworms aren't really invasive--they are just arriving fashionably late to the post glacial rebound party!

I was watching some documentaries about other northern hemisphere forests and thinking about how fun it is that so many forests just have *slightly* different versions of our same species--like a video game where different areas are just "reskinned" with different colors of monsters and things, but the structure of the level is still the same. Like Northern Europe vs New England forests just have different "flavors" of squirrels, bears, wolves, turkeys, etc. In some ways it feels like we SHOULD be pulling in "invasives" from these places to help fill ecological niches that we've left bare. I'm obviously not endorsing intentional introduction of species, but when they take hold it can be a fun exercise to reflect on why!

Maieshe Ljin wrote:

One rule of mine is if the plant doesn’t get hyper invigorated by the weeding, cutting, digging or pulling, then they are done, their work is coming to an end, and the ecosystem is in a good place and evolving in a direction towards diversity. If they do really jump back, then they haven’t done their work yet and need a little more time.

It has been my experience that when we see them and love them for who they are, the immigrant species come into balance. It takes work but eventually there is a splendor and diversity of thriving life that we are part of and essential to. Each of these plants is here for a reason and that reason likely is us, in both senses of the statement…

Again I don’t want to take away from this thread, as I completely agree with your approach to things!

That's a great point about their work not being done! One of the honeysuckles I cut back "revealed" a lovely 5 foot tall hickory sapling growing in the middle of it. I'm guessing it thrived thanks to the protection from deer offered from the honeysuckle--they don't like the honeysuckle, so it was a living tree cage!

my current targeted invasive species are Johnson Grass and Coastal Bermuda.   Doing it a little at a time is def the way to go.   I take a shift every chance I get, spreading wood-chips over the Bermuda, and pulling the Johnson Grass by the roots, and then mulching.   In the areas I've already chipped, things are easier to pull up by the roots.   The 1st pass is slower going when the roots are deep in packed clay.   In the future, I plan to be less aggressive in disturbing the soil, but for the 1/4 acre I'm working right now, I want to make room for more valuable plants as soon as possible.    Its been two years since I spread the 1st loads, and everywhere is fertile and mulched and ready to plant just by pulling the excess chips back.   I just avoid chipping areas that already have pretty natives or edibles growing.

All the effort is worth it, I like having plants that don't itch, poke, or cut me, especially if they give me food!  

"how are you planting the taller crops? Do you just poke seeds in between, or clear small patches, or just throw a handful of seed and cross your fingers? (I'm crossing my fingers that you can just throw a handful of seeds!)"

Seeds would not have a chance against Tradescantia, I either grow things from seed, usually inside on a heat tray then grow in pots until tall enough, then pull a patch of Tradescantia out and plant OR plant something thing like a tree from a nursery. I only plant perennials and usually evergreens, more competitive, gingers, cape gooseberry, globe artichoke all quite happy and hold their own, maybe a bit of help weeding around them sometimes. I even found cactus does not mind having weeds touching the stem, I though it might cause rot but doesn't (Cereus uruguayensis, a rare clay soil cactus).

   

The plants that pioneered when the glaciers withdrew were accompanied by the rest of an ecosystem - other plants, bugs, little animals, bigger animals and so on. They were not individual plants occurring without a context.
An invasive is different in that it arrives without its ecosystem, without its companions and its predators.
Often invasives were brought in as pest-resistant ornamentals, which means the local critters don't eat them. So they get a competitive advantage compared to the local plants which are eaten by the local bugs which are eaten by the local birds. Then the diversity goes down, the songbirds don't have the bugs they need for feeding their young and for migrating, it turns into a downward spiral.
I agree that working towards balance and diversity is much more important than particular plant choices. Observe and interact! Use what's there.
Going back to an imaginary pristine state is both impossible and impoverished. I utilize plants from all over the world and would miss them. At the same time, I very much enjoy experiencing areas dominated by the plants that were here before I was. I believe they have a great deal to teach us and should be protected.

One of the things that took me a while to grok is chop and drop.
Instead of

"die, die, die!!"

you think

"thanks for pulling some carbon dioxide out of the air and bringing minerals up from the subsoil - now you are going to feed my favored plants!"

and then when it comes back up - "great! more food for my apple tree" (or whatever)

One permanent solution to weeds originally mentioned, multiflora rose, honey suckle, Japanese  barberry, Oriental bittersweet etc, is shading them out as you mentioned, they all like sun I think.

You could plant usefuk trees for a canopy, then full shade tolerant edible plants or mushroom or fungi in understory. Might take a long time to get a canopy main problem.

My place has an area of mature holly, ilex aquifolium, growing wild, only a few shade loving native edible ferns growing underneath and no weeds at all. Mosty bare earth. I decided to leave them there as they are holding  up the bank even though a mild stimulant leaf tea ( containing theobromine, like cocoa )is their only use I can see.

I have spent a lot of time reading up on full and deep shade edibles, there are many but mostly little known, such as broad buckler fern, ginseng, umbrella plant and palor & pacaya palm- the flower shoot is a commercial crop in Central America, and many others.

Mostly doing well.

I don't know if this would suit your site or intentions, but one way of avoiding weeding sun lovers IF you don't enjoy weeding.

This is going to have to be a two-part post--my own experience in West Virginia, and the philosophical bit.
Here, I've found invasive bugs settle in after a few years--Asian lady beetles and brown marmarated stinkbugs were very annoying for awhile--both overwinter in houses--but have nearly disappeared, I assume because predators found them. Plants have been more problematic, especially Autumn and Russian olive, multiflora and galinsoga. And bindweed and gill-over-the ground (I believe that is AKA Creeping Charlie). The multiflora and olives have thorns and gobble up large areas; I found you can get rid of multifloras by removing the crown, but eradication of the olives, bindweed, also ailanthus trees, requires removing every bit of root, an impossible task once you let it get out of control. Galinsoga is an annual but it goes to flower so fast, you can diligently pull them all before they flower, do it again a few weeks later, then again, and again and again, and still they set a lot of seed if you miss any.
On the philosophical front: I think it depends. Probably most of the food I grow is not native to North America and I have no problem with that. SOME invasives are problematic and it's good to stop them before they create bigger problems and are impossible to eradicate. The autumn and Russian olives are a problem, but their relative the goumi I planted deliberately and am trying to propagate. (And the birds would definitely not call this one useless). I also have to point out that far and away the worst invasive problem in North America is actually a mammal, one which arrived here from Europe a few hundred years ago, has multiplied a great deal and displaced a native subspecies that was not causing any problems; meanwhile it has displaced countless species, reducing their numbers, polluted the waters and air, altered the climate dangerously...and then has the chutzpah to fuss about aggressive plants and bugs. So do we set up an eradication plan?

David Nicholls wrote:One permanent solution to weeds originally mentioned, multiflora rose, honey suckle, Japanese  barberry, Oriental bittersweet etc, is shading them out as you mentioned, they all like sun I think.

Honeysuckle, barberry, and bittersweet all love the shade. The latter two particularly will thrive in deep shade in this climate. While I generally like the idea of shading out ruderal invasives, on-the-ground experience has shown that to be ineffective for all but the most shade-intolerant; it might work for mugwort or leafy spurge, but I haven't seen it happen yet.

That's a pity

Perhaps with a tall tree crop canopy Morrows Honeysuckle & Japenses barberry could be tolerated, ignored or periodically slashed into mulch. I see Oriental bittersweet climbs to 60 ft, vines are one thing I kill by hand, seems no other way unless that gene targeting virus  in last James Bond movie, No Time to Die, is developed.

There was lots of Johnson grass, big, what I think are European thistles, what I call horse weeds, but others call giant rag weed, and burdock when I first moved here, some on my side but especially on the abandoned farm across the road. I didn't have any fences then and laying those big thistles in the garden paths helped keep the rabbits out. All of them made fine mulch and compost. That was twenty-five years ago and now there is just a little bit of Johnson grass and burdock left; I kind of like them and keep them for the nostalgia as there isn't enough to be useful anymore. Some horseweeds are still over there too, but too far away to mess with. I have been thinking of importing some of the thistles from up the road a way, because I think they are pretty, and the bumblebees love them.

Mark Reed wrote:There was lots of Johnson grass, big, what I think are European thistles, what I call horse weeds, but others call giant rag weed, and burdock when I first moved here, some on my side but especially on the abandoned farm across the road. I didn't have any fences then and laying those big thistles in the garden paths helped keep the rabbits out. All of them made fine mulch and compost. That was twenty-five years ago and now there is just a little bit of Johnson grass and burdock left; I kind of like them and keep them for the nostalgia as there isn't enough to be useful anymore. Some horseweeds are still over there too, but too far away to mess with. I have been thinking of importing some of the thistles from up the road a way, because I think they are pretty, and the bumblebees love them.

If the weeds are thistles then they should be thorny. Giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida) and horseweed (Conyza canadensis) are native plants without thorns.

From what I've understood, invasives are often most problematic in the early stages (relatively speaking) of their introduction into a new place. After a while, they tend to start accumulating predator and disease pressure, and lose some of that competitive edge that make them a problem in the first place.

I remember reading a study about garlic mustard somewhere in North America, where they found that in several locations it had increased exponentially after introduction... and then declined. Another example of the same thing, though anecdotal, I've heard from my grandmother. In her younger years, she watched lupines (highly invasive here) more or less entirely take over many roadsides and meadows, and then die back. This is in southern Sweden. In the north, where I grew up, they are still in their expansive phase. I suppose they were probably introduced a bit later farther north. We'll see if they follow the same pattern here.

Given this, keeping them down a bit and giving native species a chance in the meantime sounds like a good strategy. After all, if you somehow managed to totally eradicate an invasive species from an area, you'd also set back any local accumulation of pests and diseases that might have taken place to square one, and give the invasive a fresh start once it came back. So, well done Laurie, keep up the good work! (And enjoy all that free biomass...)

I believe that Stephen Herrod Buhnec explain it best from one of his books:

Invasive plants are Earth's way of insisting we notice her medicines.