Granby Drummer (https://granbydrummer.com/category/grow/not-wanted/)
Every other year the Connecticut Invasive Plant Working Group (CIPWG) hosts a day-long conference on invasive plants. It’s packed with presentations and workshops aimed at professionals, home gardeners and everyone in between. CIPWG is the state’s central hub on invasive plants, and the conference is a super source of up-to-date data on best practices and plant science.
Over the last century and more, we humans imported plants that do great harm to the natural balance of plants and animals—and to ourselves. Invasive species, plants and animals, are considered one of the prime causes for species extinction because of their ability to out-compete and displace native species.
With intense heat and long sunny days, June is the best time to solarize. Solarizing is a powerful way to make wholesale, non-chemical progress on tough invaders like mugwort and other not wanted plants.
Despite some difficult winter weather, Invasive Plant Activists made massive progress freeing a series of mighty sycamores and smaller native trees and shrubs at Holcomb Farm in recent months
It’s tempting to take winter out of the relentless calendar of invasive plant removal. But invasive plants have become incredibly well-established since we brought them to our shores during the last two centuries and restoring our native balance is going to take a long time.
Since October 2019, this column has profiled some of the worst invasive plants plaguing Granby’s fields, farms, forests, and gardens, and described ways to control them. This month’s column reviews in brief the first year of NOT WANTED columns.
Many of the state’s most serious invasive plants appear in home gardens as well as the open areas they rapidly dominate. Garlic mustard, multiflora rose, Asiatic bittersweet, Japanese barberry, Japanese knotweed and mugwort pop up and should be pulled by the roots when young.
Invasive Plant Activists (IPAs) now gather monthly on the second Saturday morning to control invasive plants and allow natives to flourish.
Twelve energized volunteers from Granby and Simsbury gave native plants breathing room and a chance to thrive at two West Granby sites on March 13. The bracing winds and cool temps gradually abated through the morning and complemented the internal heat produced by cutting, uprooting, dragging and flattening invasive plants.
A colorful, apparently innocuous shrub that can grow over 10 or 15 feet tall, the winged euonymus displays wild fall color ranging from light pink to fire red. In March, before leaves sprout, it’s easily identified by unusual “wings” on side branches.