Hackberry?

I noticed an interesting tree in the extreme back right (Northeast) corner of the lot after removing the buckthorn and grape vines from around it. It has light colored, very sculpted bark. I thought at first it was a species of elm, because I had recently identified several smaller elms hidden amongst the invasives elsewhere on the lot.


Celtis occidentalis bark.
But the bark didn't really match any examples of elm that I could find. Eventually, I saw an example of hackberry bark and thought that it looked like the bark on our tree. So that's what I'm calling it for now.


Celtis occidentalis leaves.
One problem is that the literature describes fruit that ripens in the fall, and I haven't seen any fruit on this tree.


Possible galls on the hackberry tree leaves.
One potential plus for this identification is the apparent existence of galls on the leaves, which is said to be common with hackberry trees. If that is actually what these spots are, they were caused by jumping plant lice.

What Remains After the Invasives are Removed

One of the more enjoyable aspects of this invasive species removal project (along with just being able to engage in an outdoor activity and see progress being made) is finding items (mainly trees) that I didn't previously know were there.  Most of the time I don't know what specific kind of tree they are until I look them up, which is part of the fun.  Several of them are still a complete mystery to me, and many I'm not completely sure of.

Typical area after invasives were removed.

As I lop down the invasive vegetation, I try to be careful not to damage any of the other flora.  As I've mentioned, there are not many other things visibly growing under the honeysuckle and buckthorn.  Probably the primary tree that I find is ash seedlings -- I don't know at what point they technically change from a seedling to a sapling, but most are shorter than a foot.  Because of their prevalence, and the number of larger ash trees in the woods I'm not excessively careful with these.  I also consider the fact that several New York counties have been infested with the emerald ash borer, so encouraging ashes to remain the dominant tree in the woods may be unwise.

Small strawberry plants.

Another plant that I find plentiful is strawberry.  I know that we have many in our yard, and they stand up pretty well to mowing, even producing a few minute berries if left un-mowed for a while in the spring.  Maybe now that they're getting more sun, some of the plants in the woods will produce a few strawberries too.

Poison ivy around a buckthorn stump.

As I've mentioned before, we do have poison ivy, and it's one of the more plentiful of the native plants.  I haven't done anything to control it lately, though I did spray Roundup on the poison ivy plants in the trails one of the first years we lived here.  The presence of poison ivy helps me maintain my carefulness about removing the exotics.  It's easy to get the toxin on about any exposed skin surface, so I'm careful to wash thoroughly when I take a break from lopping and sawing.

 

Panoramic view from near the compost bin at the back of the lot.

Exotic Bush Honeysuckle

To be clear, when I've mentioned honeysuckle so far, this is mainly the stuff I'm talking about:

 

Lonicera morrowii (Morrow's Honeysuckle) - mid September

There are a number of species of non-native and invasive honeysuckle in this part of the country, including:

• Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii)
• Bell's (or Pretty) honeysuckle (Lonicera x bella) (hybrid of Morrow's & Tartarian)
• Dwarf (or European fly) honeysuckle (Lonicera xylosteum)
• Fragrant honeysuckle or Sweet Breath of Spring (Lonicera fragrantissima)
• Morrow's honeysuckle (Lonicera morrowii)
• Standish's honeysuckle (Lonicera standishii)
• Tartarian honeysuckle (Lonicera tatarica)

I think that most of what we have on our lot is Morrow's honeysuckle.  Studies have shown that this plant is negatively allelopathic, in that besides blocking light and soaking up nutrients to take over an area, it is also toxic to certain other plant species.  What I have seen bears this out -- the areas with the thickest honeysuckle infestation are pretty much bare dirt once the honeysuckles are removed.

Some references that I've found helpful for identifying and controlling honeysuckle are:

• http://www.na.fs.fed.us/fhp/invasive_plants/weeds/bush_honeysuckle.pdf
• http://www.invasive.org/eastern/midatlantic/loni.html 
• http://www.dcnr.state.pa.us/forestry/invasivetutorial/bush_honeysuckles.htm
• http://www.nps.gov/plants/alien/fact/loni1.htm
• http://www.ipaw.org/invaders/honeysuckle/Honeysuckle.pdf 

Not all of these agree.  For example the Invasive Plants Association of Wisconsin (IPAW) says that they don't recommend pulling up loose honeysuckle, preferring that all bushes be cut and treated with herbicide so that the soil is not disturbed, which would encourage weeds.  My thinking is that something needs to replace the honeysuckle anyway, so I'll take a chance and see what comes up there.  If it's a maple or black cherry tree seedling, that's good.  If its garlic mustard, more honeysuckle, or other invasive, that's bad and someone will deal with it eventually, or not.

Front edge of back woods looking North.  Large bush in center is honeysuckle.  01-Jan-2009

 Same view today with Honeysuckle and buckthorn removed.

That was a segue into garlic mustard, which is another invasive exotic that I have seen on our lot, both in the woods and in newly seeded areas of the lawn.  It doesn't survive repeated mowing, so the lawn infestation was only temporary, and I also mowed down the patch in the woods.  But now that the woods is getting to be more open (even a bit damn sunny), I'm anticipating a problem with it next spring.  I am tamping down all the soil that I disrupt when pulling buckthorn and honeysuckle, but I'm sure that some garlic mustard will show up next year.

Garlic mustard in the woods. May 2007

What I Learned Today

I learned that though these are loppers:

This is a lopper:

Loppers aren't like scissors or pliers.  A pair of loppers is actually 2 of them, which makes a lot more sense.  What good is one scissor or one plier anyway?

I first bought an Ace compound anvil lopper a year or 2 ago at Ace Hardware (appropriately).  It's the one on the lower left in the top set of pictures.  It's still in good shape, but the arms are getting a little close together when the jaws are closed all the way.  I think it's because I tried to bite off too many large-diameter dead buckthorn branches.  Live branches close to 2-inches in diameter can be cut with this thing, but it's better to cut dead branches that big with a bow saw or just snap them off if you can.

So late this summer I bought a Corona lopper at another hardware store and found that these 2 loppers are very similar, apparently made from mostly identical parts, down to the color of the fiberglass handles. One exception is the anvil, which has an overhanging nose-like appendage on the Ace lopper (to keep branches from sliding out as they are lopped).  This feature helps a little on larger branches, but it gets in the way a bit when biting away at a honeysuckle stump.  Another difference is the black handle-cushions, which as you can see on my 2-year old Ace lopper are still in good shape, but on the newer Corona lopper the much softer sponge-like foam started to get torn up by thorns and twigs right away, one so badly that I ended up ripping it off as you can see in the lower right photo.  But that's mainly a cosmetic problem.  I've considered putting some handlebar tape on it to spruce it back up.

So, I wouldn't recommend one of these loppers over the other,  but I would recommend using a good heavy-duty compound anvil lopper instead of a bypass lopper (the kind with the scissor action).

 30-inch Bow Saw

I was about to recommend this 30-inch bow saw that I bought from Traditional Woodworker in Texas, but it appears that they just removed it from their web site's list of bow saws.  (They must have made an exclusivity deal with Bahco.)  This was a no-name saw from Italy, and it's quite stiff.  I've found that proper tension on the blade is important.  I have an older more flexible 30-inch saw that is really hard to use, even with a new blade, because the blade can curve within the saw cut, causing it to bind.

One of my smaller bow saws has a tension adjustment, so based on my experience with my flimsy old 30-inch saw, I cranked the tension up real high, but found that too much tension also causes a binding problem when the saw is not held parallel to the cut, as is often necessary when working between branches.  That saw also has a hand grip and protector, to prevent smashed knuckles I guess.  I didn't find that useful at all.  I use different hand positions on the saw depending on my angle to the tree I'm cutting, so the grip and protector just got in the way.  In fact, since I can use a lopper on many branches, much if not most of my cutting is done at the base of the tree, trying to leave as little stump as possible.  There I usually use two hands: one on the bend of the frame, and one where the blade attaches to the frame.  I often start out actually holding the blade itself so that I can twist it to control the angle of the cut (wearing leather gloves of course).

 

Those are just observations from my short personal experience with bow saws and loppers.

To Hell with Honeysuckle

I just got driven in by a thunderstorm from pulling up some of the smaller honeysuckle bushes from the wet soil.  Much of the honeysuckle in the more shaded areas (notably the areas that had the most buckthorn) can be pulled out by hand, especially when the soil is wet.  Although it could be found most everywhere in our woods, honeysuckle was established best on the edges where it could get sunlight.  The interior plants contained a lot of dead wood and many could be pulled up by hand, even in dry weather.

A lesson that I finally learned working around honeysuckle is to wear long pants.  Although it doesn't have thorns like the buckthorn does, the stems, especially the dead ones, are very brittle and can make pin-cushions (or punji-stick-cushions) of your legs, especially when you climb up on the brush pile to stomp it down.  Long pants also provide less area for poison ivy exposure.

Last week I got one of these toys: a Red Dragon BP 223 SVC 100,000 BTU Weed Dragon Back Pack Propane Vapor Torch Kit With Squeeze Valve.  I knew from experience that both the honeysuckle and buckthorn sprout right back up from the stumps within days, with nice healthy bright green leaves.  I was considering treating the stumps with chemicals late in the fall as prescribed as the most effective way of dealing with the unpullable stumps, but I decided that this flame thrower would be more fun and ecologically friendly, as long a I don't burn down the neighborhood.  I had tried a small plumber's soldering torch on a few stumps, but that only seemed slow the regrowth down a little.  (No, the small plumber was not named Mario.)

After giving this bigger torch a try, I realized that I would need to create a good burning strategy.  Wandering around the woods on a damp drizzly morning, hitting each spot where I spotted invasive plants sticking up was not going to be healthy for me or the woods, especially near areas with visible poison ivy.  I need to get all of the pullable stuff up first -- it's not always clear by looking at a plant whether it can be pulled by hand, and many of the bad guys are near seedlings of more desirable trees that I would like to protect if possible.  This thing puts out a lot of heat, and I don't know what damage it may do to nearby vegetation, even if it doesn't go up in smoke.

 

Buckthorn resprouting from stump soon after cutting.

They sell a 500,000 BTU version of this torch.  It's hard to imagine the benefit of that much more heat.

Invasive Ambivalence

We moved into a teenaged house on a half-wooded 2-acre lot a little over a decade ago.  It was a typical boring exurban house and lot.  The fairly flat mowed area was cut in the shape of a rectangle within the larger rectangular lot so that there were trees on 3 sides and a road the other, with the gray colonial-style house stuck right about in the middle of the mowed area, exactly 100 feet from the road.  Outside of the wooded area, there was only one decent size tree, an ash, which made a pretty good backyard shade tree and later clothesline pole.

Ash tree / clothesline pole, Sept. 2010.

(Items on the line have been censored.)

The woods itself was very dense.  With the exception of a deer path along an old stone fence, under a row of large maples on the eastern edge, people really couldn't walk around in the woods without getting their eye poked out until I cut some paths using a pair of big old loppers.  That made it sort of like a maze, giving people who walked trough it the sense that the lot was huge.   I identified non-native bush honeysuckle as one of the reasons that the woods was so hard to penetrate.  There was little else growing in the understory.  Above it were mostly tall, spindly ash trees and a lot of what I thought were various kinds of cherry trees.

Rhamus cathartica (European Buckthorn)

Most of these "cherry" trees had small black berries, which I guessed were choke cherries.  Indeed, failing to spit one of these out after giving it a taste would cause the taster to choke or do something similarly bad with his or her body.  I recently discovered that these were actually invasive European buckthorn trees (Rhamnus cathartica).  [Note the cathartic part of the subspecies name].  I had admired these trees because of the tangled form that they took in the woods, how cool and dark they made it in there, and how green they stayed, right up until winter.  (We're talking Finger Lakes region of NY here.)  Even though I knew that it was invasive, I also liked the honeysuckle because of  how early it leaves out in the spring and because I didn't think there would be much left if it was removed.  The whole dark maze mystique would be gone if I removed both invasives.

So it was with a lot of ambivalence that I started removing the honeysuckle and then the buckthorn from our lot of invasive species.