Garlic Mustard Loses Ground
The work at Camp Trotter & surrounding properties at Bill's Lake has made a big difference already.
Tuesday's pulling event at the camp had a great turnout and looking back at it now you really have to search for garlic mustard if you want to see it, whereas before, it lined the roadside and the camp fields. The noxious plant had been something like a rowdy crowd, jeering at you from the shoulder of the road and the sides of the woodlots, but it's now sulking in the shadows, hoping we forget about it.
Yesterday afternoon, we pulled out ten bags of garlic mustard, mostly from around the area surrounding the camp, but that accomplishment isn't even half of the story here. Before we even arrived, several residents had scoured 86th Street and many of the properties around it for garlic mustard. Ed Waits of the Bill's Lake Association sounded the call to action prior to our NIPP event and produced impressive results, making our work Tuesday much easier and allowing us to focus on some of the more widely scattered plants, the outliers in the area.
These small stands and isolated plants strewn about all over the place act much like the advance units of an army, establishing footholds & preparing the way for the larger invading horde. Although removal of them seems less fulfilling to the volunteers who cannot fill their bags as quickly or boast of large numbers or high poundages of garlic mustard 'harvest,' this kind of work goes a long way towards containment (restricting the invasive to a smaller area).
Tuesday's NIPPER event started out looking like a party where we had sent out invitations for the wrong date or place, or maybe both. This was due primarily to the admirable job done by the Bill's Lake residents/volunteers pulling garlic mustard along 86th Street, and some spraying done around Camp Trotter by NIPP during March. Still, there proved to be plenty of 'fun' for everyone. The volunteers that day not only cleaned the area of the outlying invasives but removed sizable patches of garlic mustard along El Camino Drive. We also learned of some patches of garlic mustard previously unknown to us, thanks to Bill's Lake residents, Sue McClain and Pam Flint, who spent time that afternoon scouting the area for more sites with garlic mustard. Meanwhile, back at the pulling site, Kristi Snarski and Ed Waits got into the thick of things with us, helping to pull second year plants.
Like every success story in this business of fighting invasives, this one comes with a caveat, a warning lest we get complacent. We know that garlic mustard is still lurking out there. There's bound to be some isolated plants we missed. A number of volunteers reported seeing large swaths of small plants that turned out to be the first year seedlings of garlic mustard. These seedling sites, along with the persistent bank of garlic mustard seeds that inevitably get established around garlic mustard sites, assure that we are going to see more of this plant around Bill's Lake in the future.
But it gets worse: invasives know no boundaries and they are masters at getting us to help their insidious spread in all kinds of ways. As we left Bill's Lake, we went out 92nd Street, partly so we could attack some isolated 'sprays' of garlic mustard that were already spotted down near the Deer Point area. Continuing out of the area, we went by the corner of 80th Street and Pear Avenue. For about 100 feet down 80th Street, beginning at the corner and into what appears to be Manistee National Forest land, garlic mustard is making its way into the woods along that lane. Roadside grading and snowplowing act as mechanical spreaders of garlic mustard, a sad but inevitable fact. There was, however, signs of another means of human assistance to garlic mustard's spread: casual dumping of yard waste along the shoulder of 80th Street. Yard waste disposal like this is a key mechanism by which invasives are spread. Unlike snowplowing and road grading, this is activity that does not have to happen this way. It is preventable.
If we care about the natural landscape, the beauty of the woods and fields around us, then we need to think about invasives and about how they are like a contagion. For our own benefit, for our neighbors, for the public at large, for the environment itself, garlic mustard locations need to be thought of as something like 'quarantine zones,' places where we take steps to isolate and eradicate it. We need to prevent it from traveling in and out of the area. We need to think of and stop doing (wherever possible) the things we are doing to assist it. Yard waste can normally be composted on site. If garlic mustard is found, it can be bagged and landfilled. If it is not found but known in to be in the area, then covering the compost with a tarp should prevent seedlings from sprouting and escaping to the surrounding environment. Dumping on vacant lots and public land will only be self-defeating and harmful. At the very least, wherever you dump your yard waste, monitor it frequently for signs of invasives, especially since garlic mustard is known to be nearby.
Next Garlic Mustard Pull Dates:
Our next date to pull is this coming Saturday, April 24 at the Anderson Flats, beginning at 9 a.m. Additional dates will be scheduled, including at least one date for a new location that's in our sights now: the Devil's Hole river flats, located at the end of Spruce Avenue on the south side of the Muskegon River.
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