How come?
That’s the Museum kind of Conservation. I don’t do that type of Conservation because it’s not realistic. Climate Change is changing the ecosystem, I want to help plant species to adapt with the changing times/environment if you get what I’m saying.
Yes but the things I like also benefit the environment, it isn’t mutually exclusive.
uhh… is this why the “war on invasive species” is so expensive? What exactly are they spending their money on? How can it be this expensive?
We have invasive Australian wattles. Originally planted to stabilise sand dunes. Now a fire hazard. But they make good fodder for goats.
Cape Town has come out of 4 days of wildfire across 3000 hectares of Table Mountain national park. Table Mountain itself not affected this time.
Clearing invasive aliens is hugely expensive and absolutely worth it.
The Museum you dismiss is what the rest of us understand as conservation.
Copied from the USDA website ( https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/what-are-invasive-species )
How do Invasive Species Spread?
Invasive species are spread primarily by human activities, often unintended. People, and goods transported, travel quickly around the world, and often carry uninvited species with them. Invasive species can be introduced to an area by ship ballast water, firewood, accidental release, and by people. Insects can be transported easily in wood, shipping palettes, and crates shipped across the globe. Ornamental plants can become invasive after escaping in the wild. Released unwanted pets are another way invasive species are spread. See our pathways information to learn more about how invasive species are introduced to new areas.
What are the Impacts of Invasive Species?
The introduction and establishment of invasive species to the U.S. (intentional or unintentional) can pose a significant threat to native and plant communities. Invasive species can lead to the extinction of native plants and animals, destroy biodiversity, and permanently alter habitats. See our impacts section to learn more about the various impacts of invasive species – economic and social, environmental and ecological, and human health.
I don’t, and for once I have to kind of agree with @professor_porcupine .
Humans can certainly coexist with nature - in fact, I say humans are a part of nature. Digging trout lilies, hopniss jerusalem artichokes, and a host of other multi-root edibles actually helps the plants, as the soil is disturbed around them.
However, a forest choked by invasives such as bittersweet, kudzu, and garlic mustard is unacceptable to me.
i’m new to the question (i’m an avid gardener and recently dig in the conservation side) but, isn’t it a way to garden without being “the bad guy” ? or is it just blind optimism?
i really like the idea of having a foraging garden and tending to wild plants :)
No one is saying that gardening is bad. It’s just that the way OP is doing it is wildly irresponsible.
In my (very limited) knowledge, your typical garden plants won’t readily propogate. If you want something that will live for years and regulalry bear fruit, look up native bushes and trees. You provide food for yourself and wildlife with no risk of spreading invasives. Just do your research and make sure you are getting truly natives plants.
Here’s a site I like because you can sort by state and each plant has lots of information on the product page, including a range map based on county. https://www.prairienursery.com/plants-seeds/native-plants.html
I like prairie nursery too and second this.
Another one is prairiemoon.com.
I just got some Purple Passion Flower seeds from them. Trying to do the cold germination in the fridge now.
That’s an important reason to manage forests, to prune back overgrowth.
Altho fires are also a natural process with many fire adapted species.
Nature is in a constant state of change, how do you conserve that? If I understand it correctly, conservation is protecting species/forrests you think need help.
How do you conserve bad genetics that put a whole species at risk?
How do you conserve without allowing adaptation to a changing climate?
I think the key word is can, but that doesn’t mean it always has too. This means there’s a root cause for any species becoming “Invasive”.
How much is the blame on “Invasive” species actually the result of a changing climate?
For example, deer are a “Native” species but there’s too many of them causing a dis-balance of deer pressure. Why is a “Native” species dis balancing my local ecosystem?
Deer absolutely put to risk many “Native” & “Non-Native” species in my ecosystem.
That’s what I’m saying, many of these species need soil disturbance to make good germination beds for their seeds. Also where did you find Jerusalem artichokes? Were they wild or feral domesticated populations? Do your plants make seeds you plant/propagate? That’s a species I’d love to grow & introduce to my ecosystem! Same with Hopniss.
I agree! A Forrest shouldn’t be choked out by 1 or 2 plants, Monocultures aren’t the ideal. Polycultures & Diversity for the win!
Me too!
Oh I bought some seeds from there. It’s like one of the very few websites that actually sells wild seeds. I got Wild Beans & different types of Poppy Mallow (2 Species I think have potential for domestication).
I’d actually love to trade with other gardeners/foragers on here, Surely I’m not the only one who save seeds.
@oksanaetal What seeds do you save? Sounds like you got a lot of cool “Native” edibles.
@comfycademia I’m curious what kinds of plants you have or would like to have growing? Do you save any seeds?
They grow in many places where I live, all wild.
I agree with that! It’s just that invasives just love to make monocultures.
Yes, because it was artificially introduced to a foreign environment. While this can happen naturally, that doesn’t mean we can brush off the responsibility of introducing these species ourselves.
There was an example on here a while ago. Something about lizards floating to Florida on patches of vegetation. These are invasive, but because they made it here by somewhat naturally occuring means, it’s debatable on whether or not they should be culled.
That is the grey area of conservation. What isn’t so debatable is intentionally introducing foreign organisms and trying to naturalise or hybridize them with the local environment. That is just asking for disaster. Do you really want to be responsible for inteoducing, for example, an invasive river plant that sucks all of the free oxygen out of the water and kills every other species living in the river?
Conservation is a science, with proven best practices backed up by decades of evidence. If you want to help, research these practices and be part of the solution. If you want to contribute to the problem, keep doing what you’re doing.
That has historically been the premise of conservation, but more recently that premise has been questioned. An alternative viewpoint is to restore robustness to an ecosystem so that it is resilient to inevitable changes (including climate change).
Think of the American chestnut. Can the survivors of chestnut blight be considered to fill the original role of chestnuts in that ecosystem? But the effort to introduce resistance to blight involved crossing with Chinese chestnuts. The resulting trees will never be “pure” American chestnut, but if they can fill the lost ecological role, isn’t that better than nothing?
In large part, the “war on invasive species” has been about agriculture, mitigating crop losses. That is where most of the herbicides and pesticides are used. And there have been discussions in the conservation community about how to define “economic impact” of an invasive – some have pointed out that merely pointing to the dollar amount spent on eradication is a circular argument, because it does not address whether there was an impact prior to the eradication effort.
There was some discussion of this on Permies, a permaculture forum. A viewpoint was expressed that if someone cannot keep up with managing the invasives, it means that they have too much land – meaning more land than they can manage. That may be true in a production landscape, but I don’t know that it applies in a landscape meant for nature.
In one of these threads, I linked to my observation of a dense monoculture of Strawberry Guava in Hawaii. @professor_porcupine commented on that observation: “someone really needs to prune that make to make it yield a lot more fruits.” Keeping it pruned and thinned would mitigate its tendency to form monocultures. The problem, of course, is that birds and other animals would spread the seeds to new areas – areas where there isn’t someone to keep it pruned. A lot of Hawaii is closed, inaccessible except to the few members of TNC or other such entities. I have complained elsewhere that conservation seems to be mainly about micromanaging nature; well, keeping the strawberry guava pruned everywhere it occurs would be a massive micromanagement effort which would require a lot more humans in the bush.
On the other hand, the nonnative species in Hawaii have formed their own self-sustaining ecosystems. It is sad to have lost the native vegetation; but it is worthwhile asking whether these novel ecosystems can be valuable from an overall conservation perspective – including such questions as ecosystem services, climate resiliency, and so forth.
All this has strayed very far from the title of the thread, which is simply a question: “Is there a difference between foraging and gardening?” There is a fundamental difference. Foragers do not necessarily intervene to “improve” the plants they forage – that can be seen in the other thread where the question was asked what improvements we would like to see in the plants we forage, and most responses expressed a purist viewpoint, viz., that every wild foragable is already perfect. No gardener would agree that every garden plant is already perfect. This is a real divide between foraging and gardening.
Forager: Can I eat that?
Gardener: Can I admire that?
Conservationist: Can I save that from destruction?
Yes. Yes yes yes.
To add to this:
Non-native isn’t necessarily invasive. This is why I love apple trees and don’t get angry when I see one growing wild. They came from Europe, but here they don’t really cause any harm, and the animals eat the fruits, and I love the trees.
Garlic mustard, however…
The argument for cross breeding to increase resilience is far above my knowledge. I understand the need to help species adapt to climate change, but there is a big difference between me and the people doing it. They know what they’re doing, I don’t.
So I’ll stick with the safer option of planting only natives, and encourage anyone outside of those professional research or conservation groups to do the same.
What did the environment in your area look like before human intervention? There are few places on earth that haven’t been populated by humans for thousands of years, and the exact distribution and structure of ecosystems that long ago is not known for the vast majority of places. Climate change plays a role here too, in multiple ways - one, because the environment that existed, for example, along the shore of southern Lake Erie (where I live) before human occupation was likely boreal forest that obviously could not persist in the region today, and two because even supposedly “untouched” areas are affected by warming, changing precipitation patterns, microplastics and other industrial byproducts in rain- and groundwater. etc.
Going forward, as @jasonhernandez74 pointed out, I think it makes much more sense to focus on encouraging the development of ecosystems (obviously composed of species that have co-evolved to at least some degree, rather than invasives) that can handle the effects of climate change and other disturbances. That doesn’t need to involve genetic tinkering of any kind - American Beech, for example, are a major native component of the forests where I live and should (to my knowledge) be able to withstand the effects of climate change on my region provided that the leaf and bark diseases can be kept under control.
That’s a much better way of putting it than I wrote.
Man… I wish Jerusalem Artichokes grew wild here. I would love to trow sow some seeds so it could. My ecosystem could use some.
Yea… I wonder how Invasive species work if Nature tends towards balanced polycultures?
Are Invasive species natural monocultures? In some cases can monocultures be “Natural”? I’m thinking of Bamboo & what it naturally does. But eventually even these Monocultures get disrupted.
I wonder how many “Native” species were brought over naturally by Homo sapiens (If that’s possible, cuz Humans have moved plants all around for sure & probably long before we documented any of it)?
I’m thinking is Chenopodium album & Taraxacum officinale Native to North America or not?
I see, but species going extinct due to bad genetics is can also be disastrous. How else do you suggest making species at risk of extinction more competitive with in their natural environment? I guess it depends on which species you value & want to conserve.
My breeding efforts can not be that successful, another species will eventually balance it out. Nature has taught me that lesson time & time again.
So has no Conservationist used plant breeding or facilitating hybrid swarms? Seems like the better long term solution than trying to preserve unfit genetics.
Does Conservation allow evolution or not?
I think so! Species need to be allowed to evolve, crossing with other species is how species evolve!
oh that’s a really good point.
I think so, if every forrest/nature enjoyer managed species like this, I think it’s possible.
I currently do this with the Abandoned forests, I maintain the trails to make hiking the forrest more enjoyable for myself & others, even tho I don’t own the land. I always bring pruners with me when I forage because I can Prune out abundant Multiflora Rose & Spicebush that get in the pathway. It’s very therapeutic too, another way to bond/connect with the nature.
This also has the effect of availablizing more sunlight! Not only does this help create better ariflow for spicebush but also allows the Mayapple underneath it to eventually fruit. I find much less diversity in areas with too much shade, Wineberries occasionally grow here which is why I value them (Imagine if Black Raspberry had some of those Shade Tolerant Genetics too).
I agree, that is what birds do however I would be harvesting a lot of fruit myself too.
Yikes… why is that?
I agree! It’s really sad to loose native vegetation, especially when an entire species goes extinct (That no Future generations get to enjoy 
).
Absolutely novel ecosystems can be valuable, as they prove themselves fit for the changing climate. Species evolve just like ecosystems evolve to adapt with the changing climate.
I want to help “Native” species adapt & evolve to their changing environment, especially when the species limited genetics put it at risk towards extinction.
The Climate is changing faster than many native species can adapt to it. I want Natives to be a part of the Novel Ecosystem, not to be pushed out from it if that makes sense.
I want Mayapples, Spring Beauty, Amelanchier, Sweet Cecily to be thriving for future generations to enjoy, even if they’re more diverse genetically.
yea… we went deep into it. I thought there was no fundamental difference because they’re at the core the same activity just on different spectrums.
I just see a lot of transition gray area between gardening & foraging hence why I thought there was a spectrum of difference.
I see. Perhaps me being both a forager & a gardener I didn’t notice this divide?
Wild foods tend to have more concentrated nutrition but plant breeding can also improve this. It’s just often times domesticated selection for larger fruits means the nutrient concentration gets watered down (Compare to small wild blueberries for example). I see no good reason not to eat & enjoy both. The hybrid between both would be even cooler!
I agree, not all species need it but some absolutely would benefit from it.
I do like encouraging crosses to happen tho.
hmm… there is also the fungal mycorhhiza & soil life side of it. If the soil life is in poor health, so will the beech trees be. However I think some crossing with other species can create an offspring with resistance to these diseases.
I see no reason why we can’t tackle the problem from both directions.