“A year from now you may wish you had started today.”

-Karen Lamb

Before & After... and Before

The Stewardship Network's Garlic Mustard Challenge says it all just in the title of their annual event: this work is a real challenge. And it's easy to get discouraged when you are facing large stands of garlic mustard along with widely scattered outliers and just thousands of first year seedlings carpeting huge areas of land in front of you. They even reflect on this and offer some good advice in their blog spot (See: "So Much to Pull, So Little Time).

Myself, I find I have to keep looking at the cleared areas we have just  done, not the sprawling stand still ahead of me. Whenever I look at the patch I am working on and see what I am still facing (often after I have already started to feel the creak of my back and most of the joints in my body) I want to quit and take up a new cause. That's the truth, as much as I hate to admit to those thoughts and feelings. 

So, I look ahead: to the cleared areas, to the sight of the forest floor again revealed where we have pulled away the swarming mob of garlic mustard plants. This keeps me going.

Then sometimes after the job is finished at a site, I find we have only hit one part of it, and there's plenty of 'carpet' I didn't notice before. Shown above in the side-by-side photos is one site we just worked at today. Notice the mature plants stretching out ahead in the photo on the left and then compare that same stretch of ground after we finished pulling. Looks good, right?

Out of view in both photos, as it turns out, there's at least two other large stands located about 300 feet down the tree line. Then there's the seedlings covering so much of the area in between. This not the first time, or last I am sure, that this has happened to me. Hence, the cycle: before, after, before...and on it goes.

This is a problem where the disease model fits quite well. We are dealing with contagion. We cannot expect a cure, at least not anytime soon. We cannot be surprised at new outbreaks because that's how contagion goes. We can, however, contain it. We can still hope for a cure someday and in the meantime every 'case' we encounter is worth our effort. 

Our goal ultimately should be for 'garlic mustard free zones,' places where we will not tolerate it. How we choose those places, how many of them and where, depends on us. The important thing to remember is that we decide, not the invasives.