The Woods in Your Backyard
Hausman on the Woods in Your Backyard 3-4-09 3:20
More than 60 percent of the land in Virginia is covered by trees, and 66 percent of all forest in the commonwealth is privately owned. That’s why state officialsare holding a series of workshops for people with trees in their backyard – hoping to improve the quality of Virginia woodlands by working with homeowners. Sandy Hausman has more on that story:
(21 / 29) On a cold, sunny afternoon Peter Warren and Adam Downing have escaped their desks at Virginia Cooperative Extension and are taking a walk in Crozet – midway between Waynesboro and Charlottesville. To the left there’s an old farm field, to the right, a golf course, but in the future Downing sees forests:
12 – Fields are nothing more than forests waiting to happen. If you let it go, it will be forestland, because + that’s the nature of this area. Now in the Midwest and the plains it’s different. It’s grass.
They pass by black locust, oak, and tulip poplars – hardwoods that have long grown in Virginia soil. And then Downing comes to an alanthes – commonly known as a Tree of Heaven. To him, the name is a joke. These are trees from hell. Well, actually, they come from Asia, but they have no natural enemies and are so aggressive, that they’re crowding out Virginia trees:
18 – Where it is native, it has natural checks and balances, just like our native trees do. 19 – So this is one of the things that we talk to with land owners – particularly small acreage land owners, cuz they have a great opportunity to get a handle on this. When you start getting into hundreds of acres, it’s a daunting task, but when you’re talking about an acre or even ten acres, this is something the + homeowner can do. So if they have these trees on their property, you would like them cut down? I would like them to die in one form or another, and cutting them down may or may not accomplish that. Alanthes trees are a good example. Cutting them an alanthes tree just makes it mad, and it comes back 100 fold, so it needs to be treated with an appropriate herbicide – get that material into the root system where it just stays in the root system, it doesn’t get into the soil, it doesn’t effect other plants, and + you’re doing a good thing. Yes there are risks associated with herbicides, but they don’t compare to the risks of letting invasive plants run wild.
Further down the path, we come across another invasive – a thorny green shrub with long, arching stems called multi-flora rose:
24 – Government agencies, extension included, promoted this – farmers would plant these as living fences, but we’ve found out they don’t behave themselves, so now we say get rid of them. We all learn from their mistakes. Is this hard to get rid of? It looks pretty nasty, pretty thorny? Physically it’s hard but it’s do-able. A lot of farmers will just wrap a chain around the bottom and pull it out.
What you don’t want to pull out are dead trees that make woods look messy:
26 – That’s an apartment complex for small mammals, and if you have dead trees, leave them standing if you can, unless they’re a danger to people.
In which case, you can take the tree down and make compost. Peter Warren says combining woodland and kitchen waste creates fantastic soil:
6 – You don’t put meat products in your compost, for example, because that’s something that will smell bad, but most of your average kitchen waste and yard waste doesn’t smell at all, and it does produce, in not too long a period of time, black gold that does enrich your garden.
And – yes – cooperative extension also offers a class on how to compost. For more information on their programs, or to get a book called The Woods in Your Backyard, visit our website for a link. In Crozet, Sandy Hausman, WVTF News