Month: May 2015

All of those phragmites really added up. This was one of many huge brushpiles of invasive plants that we had to burn over the years.

Cornus amomum (“silky dogwood”) has beautiful red twigs in the winter. This native forms thickets that are great for all kinds of wildlife. We bought ten 1-year-old specimens at a fantastic price.

There were so many huge multiflora roses invading the west end of the pond, and so many old, huge bittersweet vines strangling the trees, one day I decided to have at them with the backhoe. I carefully positioned the tractor, not sideways, but up and down on the slope down to the pond, then dug in the teeth of the front end loader, to help stabilize it.

This:

stood no chance against this:

roots and all:

Bittersweet:

Now you can at least access the pond, from this side:

 

Most of the phragmites we’ve encountered this summer are dead stalks. There are a few resprouts, such as these:

And these:

Here’s a closeup photo of pulled phragmites resprouts:

As the summer progresses, the level of the pond diminishes, so it’s a good chance to easily reach even more dead phragmites stalks, and get as many as possible of them out of the pond. Here, Steve is working on the east end:

There are so many photos from 2012, I don’t know where to begin! So many people spent so many days, not just removing the tops of the phragmites, which were now dead and brown, but also digging out as much as their smelly and disgusting rhizomes as possible. Now that they had been significantly weakened, we wanted to minimize their re-sprouting. Plus, we just wanted those huge, ugly, thick rhizomes out of our pond, so the plants and animals that belonged there, like this black swallowtail butterfly, could use it.