By Pam Willison
On September 20 seven volunteers stepped forward for Fall Work Day to help make a dent in the invasive common buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) located in Owen Sowerwine. A huge thank you to those who joined me: Denny, Rod, Ronda, Jess, Barbara, and Pat.
Over the past six years we have focused our removal efforts on eliminating the large seed-producing trees and dense stands of buckthorn in order to allow native shrubs to thrive in those spaces. The bank of buckthorn seeds already on the ground also responded in those open spaces, creating a blanket of small
seedlings and saplings.
Six members of the work crew settled in along the education trail to snip off small buckthorn and treat the cut stems with a glyphosate solution applied with a dauber bottle. In the end we each had a small cleared space with only native plants remaining, mostly snowberry and chokecherry.
While the nipper and dauber crew worked, Denny continued working on a mature stand of buckthorn located off the main trail. Using the injection lance, he placed glyphosate capsules into the cambium layer of the mature trees. The glyphosate is drawn down into the root systems, and by next spring the majority of those trees will be dead.
Our work eliminating the invasive buckthorn (among several other invasives) is an ongoing process and can
sometimes seem overwhelming. However, every bit of progress is still progress, and we are gratified to see the positive effect we have had.
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