Managing invasives is important to the health of our ecosystem. Non-native, aggressive plants can crowd out native plants that support a web of wildlife which keeps the natural world intact and healthy.
Jeff and his wife bought a house on 8.5 acres of depleted dairy farmland in Claverack in 2013. After clearing a bit, opening a viewshed and uncovering an old farm pond, they gradually settled on a goal of removing invasive plants and adding more natives. This goal has been refined over several years toward what they describe as “enhancing habitat toward greater biodiversity”.
Climate Smart Claverack (CSC): You've been engaged in a project to restore habitat and increase biodiversity on your property in Claverack for almost 10 years. Can you describe the property and the state it was in when you started?
Jeff Kiplinger (JK): I’m not sure we understood what we were engaged in at the beginning. When we first started looking at what we had, we saw a lot of early forest successional growth (eastern red cedar, black cherry, sugar maple, black walnut) mixed in with an impenetrable jungle of invasive honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii), barberry (Berberis thunbergia), buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), and multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora).
Shown below from top left to bottom right in order.
You couldn’t walk anywhere except where we’d had an excavator clear.
So initially the project was “get rid of the bad stuff”, and with that came a little more focus on native plants.
I bought a small tractor and started learning how to use it by trying to dig out some of the biggest stuff, like the 50-year-old honeysuckles and the biggest autumn olives (Eleagnus umbellata). The cool thing was, that under them we found smallish natives, ferns and tree seedlings that began to grow and fill in.
Left: John on his baby John Deere. Right: Autumn Olive.
We met a native plant landscaper, Heather Grimes, around this time who gave us a valuable formula for not getting discouraged and overwhelmed. Heather said just focus on a couple of invasives at a time, figure out how to get rid of those, and native stuff will appear like magic.
CSC: What did you start with? What were some of the early projects and what tools did you have?
JK: Really just the usual garden tools, and the little tractor. Over time I found favorite tools – don’t get me started telling you about my 2.5 pound full handle mattock – but what happened gradually was that I came up with a favorite system for attacking each plant. I do everything from hand-pulling to using chains and the tractor to pull entire root balls. For some things, I cut roots out. There are even plants that I need to use very limited amounts of herbicides, and I have several targeted application tools for those. I think that just like learning the methods that work best to grow a particular garden plant, there’s a specific method for every invasive.
A big tool for me now, and an experiment, is fire. We have some open areas and I burn each one on a three year rotation. The idea is to control woody plants and leave things open, and also to favor the perennials and warm season grasses over annuals. It seems to be a good system so far.
CSC: What would you say you've learned over the years? What are a few things you think you would do differently now?
JK: The point about a specific method for each plant is a big lesson, and one that sometimes takes me a few growing seasons to figure out. But in general, the big lessons are:
Don’t be too precious. Sometimes disturbance – maybe even on the scale of, say, an excavator coming in to remove all the Common reed (Phragmites australis) or the Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) from an area is good for the land. We have to remember that disturbances by elk herds or by fire before Europeans arrived were common and a part of the ecology of the native plants that were here. When you’re looking at a problem area, don’t pick at it, deal with it.
Everything is an experiment. We’ve had a lot of failures, like removing something and finding a new invasion of something else. Asian bittersweet (Celastris orbiculatus) and Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vinimium) are problems in areas where I’ve disturbed the soil in removing other plants.
If you choose to add something to your land as you remove invasives, stick with stuff that should be there. We’ve had heartbreaking failures trying to introduce stuff that grows, say, in the Catskills but doesn’t like our shale bank environment. And I introduced largemouth bass to our pond, partly because we seemed to have a lot of leeches – which are a normal component of a pond edge ecosystem. The fish ate most of our frogs.
When you remove the invasive understory in your woodland, don’t expect a diverse new understory to grow in easily. This is because we have about 50-100 times the optimal deer population per square mile in Columbia County. There’s no easy solution (I hunt, and I’m working on fencing part of our land), but you will learn as you go to observe how interconnected and complex the problem of “enhancing biodiversity” really is. One solution often exposes another problem that needs a fix!
CSC: What are some recommendations you can give to someone just starting to manage invasives and what methods do you recommend?
JK: There’s no one answer, because everyone’s land will be different. An old meadow might need to be disced and harrowed several times and re-planted, then cut or burned regularly. Woods may be open or dense with thorns. Wet areas might have invasive reeds so dense that nothing else can grow.
I still advocate doing what I learned to do first. Learn to identify just a couple of invasives – once you start there are so many plants you can hate! Figure out a means of control and go at these two. Look at what happens after – it will almost always be surprising.
And I do recommend doing a lot of control work in the early spring. Many of our worst invasives green up earlier than native plants in the spring, so it’s a good time to quickly and easily find them.
CSC: What have been the hardest invasives to get rid of and what methods do you recommend?
JK: For me, Phragmites is almost impossible to control. I’ve been working on it on our land for years and it is reduced but needs attention all the time. Buckthorn and multiflora rose, and honeysuckle will keep coming back because birds poop out seed from the berries they eat on nearby properties, so I just have to keep walking through the woods and pulling or cutting when they appear.
Tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), buckthorn, Asian bittersweet and autumn olive are probably the most physical labor. Seedlings can sometimes be pulled, but anything bigger is best controlled by the “cut and paint” (also “hack and squirt”) method. In the fall, when the trees are pumping nutrients down toward the root, cut the trunk and dab the cambium with herbicide (triclopyr is often recommended). This tightly targeted application kills the tree and roots without endangering other plants or the life that depends on them.
CSC: What land management projects are up next for you?
JK: That question depresses me – there’s so much to do!
But seriously, there are two things I’m interested in now that we are seeing progress.
The first is observing and recording the progress itself, through photography, recording notes, and through citizen science apps like Cornell’s eBird and Merlin. If you think about it, birds are easier to observe than insects, although it takes a little effort to learn who’s who in your backyard. We’ve now observed over 90 species visually and through their songs, and about 30 are nesting here. We know this is a huge increase over 7-8 years ago when we were just getting started. It represents proof that the project is achieving what we intend.
The second is to begin to show the property to others interested in doing something similar to their land. What you can do will vary – someone with 250 acres will take different actions than us, and someone with ½ an acre will do something else. There’s a developing community of people participating in projects like this, through networks like the Homegrown National Park (homegrownnationalpark.org). There are preservation projects and pollinator gardens and towns planting roadsides with native plants. Our project is not any one thing, more a series of experiments and tries at management that are conceived by walking around on the property and seeing what’s there, what’s new, and what’s possible.
Ultimately, we feel like there are many pressures on biodiversity, and one of the big ones is the rapid rate of change in our landscape due to climate change. We’re not trying to deny that’s happening, trying to recreate something out of the past. We’re trying to contribute to a growing base of land that is managed in order to be a haven, or a refuge, for the organisms that are trying to adapt to the planet as it goes through its changes.
BEFORE:
TODAY:
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