20 years fighting honeysuckle, bittersweet, Norway maple, multiflora rose, privet, etc., and I only own 6/10th of an acre of land. At least the natives are also doing well.
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If regeneration takes multiple human lifetimes, how will you hand your 20 year project off to the next person who will continue with observation and restoration?
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The same way I’ve handed off past houses I’ve owned: sign some papers, walk away, and never go back. While I would prefer to think I have a long-lasting and positive impact on the world, that’s probably not true at all. I bet the best thing I’ve done is simply not having children.
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Me too. Our first garden still has trees around the boundary. Second garden still green, but he added greenhouses for orchids and she collects succulents - so not really too much indigenous surviving at either. Now I focus my rewilding on this third smaller patch.
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My nemeses are rose of sharon, bindweed, mugwort, and porcelain berry - which honestly is a nightmarish combination that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. That’s not even everything, but I’ve managed to knock back at least the Vinca major enough that its manageable.
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Exactly the same for me, although I’ve been renting and not owning (the curse of the millennial). I expect many of the native plants I’ve put at the current house I’m at will survive, since they’re hardy shrubs, but I also expect that holly, ivy, blackberry, spurge-laurel, and cherry laurel will take it over, since the neighbors grow those ornamentally. And like you, I’ve decided not to have kids, since that seems like the only lasting positive impact I can have on the world.
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I would be very careful about plant exchanges with friends, neighbors, garden clubs, etc., however well-intentioned. It is very easy to accidentally import unwanted invasive organisms.
Invasive nonnative plants can be undetected in soil or pots, and be quite capable of running rampant.
My personal nemesis is “Goutweed” (a.k.a. Bishop’s weed) which I have been battling for two decades. It needs only a tiny fragment of root to propagate, a fact that I learned, to my lasting horror, when I inadvertently started a patch in my own woods, by dumping my weeds there. You would not want me to kindly offer you a native fern from my garden, because goutweed is there, and it’s never going to not be there…
And there are other organisms as well. I have a great fear of accidentally acquiring the ecologically damaging “jumping worm” earthworms that are becoming a big problem in many areas, including Vermont.
https://vtinvasives.org/invasive/jumping-worms
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My method to mitigate this is to transplant starts or native plant volunteers into potting soil, then let grow them for about a month or so. That’s usually long enough for any pest plants here to make themselves known. It’s not without some risk, though. Plus, a lot of potting soil has peat in it, which is its own tremendous issue. Feels like you can’t win, sometimes lol.
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I read that wheat bran will kill slug and snails and is used like diatomaceous earth - circle the plant with it and add more after it rains. It also becomes humus when it breaks down in the soil. I haven’t tried it yet.
I’m trying the coffee grounds right now and I think it might actually be working. I spread it thickly around some vulnerable seedlings and so far they haven’t got demolished.
I prefer not to kill the slugs and eventually did since things were getting desperate. But this might actually work keeping them away, for now. Will try next spring and see.
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Bindweed and Common Buckthorn, a.k.a. Hostileberry*. I don’t know who in the neighborhood had the bright idea to plant buckthorn, but I would really like to track them down, smack them in the head a few times, and hand them the post-holer. “You put it in; you can help dig it out.”
*(Because the names that we usually call the stuff—including a##h##e bush—are NSFW.)
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Yup. My spouse is on a personal campaign to eliminate “common buckthorn” from our property, while my mission is to keep the “goutweed” and “cow parsley” at bay. An exercise in futility.
Of course, there are lots more invasives out there, but you gotta pick your battles…
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Then, you could consider the possibility to start a nursery specialized in native species to try to conquer the market.
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Bindweed! Arrgh!
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Try you local farmer’s markets. I’m not in the Pacific Northwest, but at my local farmer’s market they sell native perennial plants for $7 per 6-pack or $5 per individual pot, which might not be as cheap as Home Depot petunias, but it’s affordable.
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I tried this, but the same nursery that is suuuuuper spendy runs the only native plant farmstand at the farmer’s market! I actually think I’m fine now, though, at least for a couple years. My penstemon, columbine, harebells, and lupine successfully seeded last year, and I’ve got more offspring than I know what to do with now. I’m giving them away at my allotment :)
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I wish that more native species were as cheap and inexpensive as petunias. (No offense to those that like petunias, or if you live in areas where they’re native. I’d just rather plant something that doesn’t end up looking like wet kleenex after a hard rainstorm.) Penstemon aren’t cheap, but there’s nothing like the scent when a whole bunch of P. palmeri blooms.
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