Garlic Mustard in it's early spring growth.

With this early spring, we of course are seeing an even earlier emergence of this year's crop of invasive plants. The autumn olive, invasive honeysuckle, and multiflora rose seem to be leading the pack. Go anywhere, look anywhere and you will see them dominating the scenery.

Not as noticeable yet but just as far out front of the spring ephemerals, garlic mustard is getting its own head start on things. With this early and exceptionally warm spring, it seems we may have a smaller window of time in which to remove garlic mustard before it goes to seed.

Four locations have our attention right now: the Newaygo Riverside Park, Camp Trotter out at Bill's Lake, the Anderson Flats on the Muskegon River outside of Newaygo, and the Hungerford Recreation Area up in the northeastern part of the county.

Here's the story on our plans so far:

• We have a date scheduled for a garlic mustard pull at the Hungerford Recreation Area: April 11, 2012 (a Wednesday). The plan is to meet at 10:30 a.m. Pat Ruta-Mchan of the National Forest Service and work on about three 'hubs' of garlic mustard that Pat has been working on removing. Our exact meeting place is yet to be determined but I am assuming it will be somewhere up at the recreation area. I am assuming we will only need to put in two hours or so if we can get at least four volunteers working. Of course, if there's an interest we could arrange some car pooling ahead of time. If you can come to this, please let us know so we can know how to plan our day. 

• At the Newaygo Riverside Park, we expect to go out tomorrow, March 29, bright and early and apply spray and do some pulling. This infestation is much worse than we originally thought, so we expect to need to go back within the next two to three weeks to pull the more mature plants that escaped our first effort.

• Camp Trotter: we have been in touch with the VFW and they are agreeable to us coming out and working at their property. We have also attempted to contact the Bill's Lake Association to secure their help and cooperation. We are still awaiting word back from them. In any case, we expect to schedule a pull out at Camp Trotter at least within the next few weeks.

• Anderson Flats: this is a widely scattered infestation across several parcels of property and it goes into a wetland. We are still working on contacting property owners and securing permissions. We will let you know if and when we are ready to start planning for a removal at this location. If anyone knows owners down at Anderson Flats, please let us know who to contact.

Don't forget: this Thursday night is the time for our second EDRR informational meeting. It is at the Grant Public Library from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. This is a repeat of our March 3 presentation, so if you attended that, of course you don't need to come to the Grant meeting. However, if you know anyone else who might be interested, then please send them our way.