Landscaping Kill and Removal Project becomes a Digression on Sustainable Agriculture
I'm removing several large arborvitae that have been repeatedly topped to form a hedge. The arbs are in bad shape and heavily overgrown with Himalayan Blackberry and English Ivy. I used mostly mechanical means to remove the arbs -- I cut them up for kindling and firewood.
Himalayan Blackberry is nasty stuff. Most of the wild blackberry in this area is a hybrid between the native Pacific Blackberry and the Himalayan Blackberry. It's aggressive, thorny, and invasive. The berries are good and for the past couple years, I've picked the berries from the arbs. Now that we want to renovate the area, however, I want the blackberries out of there. Using heavy leather gloves, I cut all the cane back and removed it for burning. Since then, I've been spraying and grubbing to remove the rest of the blackberry.
English Ivy is officially listed as a noxious weed in Oregon. Let me repeat that for the incredulous. English Ivy is on the official list of noxious weeds in the State of Oregon. After having dealt with English Ivy in this area, I am inclined to believe the listing is correct. It is invasive and very, very, hard to get rid of. I guess our climate is perfect for it.
When I cut the arbs down, I pulled up as much of the ivy as I could. I'm now in the process of repeatedly spraying and grubbing the ivy to complete the removal.
I am using Round-up -- actually a generic glyphosate that costs half as much -- mixed with a spray tracer dye to let me see exactly what I have sprayed. I highly recommend spray tracer type dyes for spot spraying because they make it so much easier to see what you're doing.
While I have the spray out, I'm also killing some quackgrass, bindweed, and other persistent perennial weeds in places where they are easy to spray without damaging desirable plants.
Mechanical means are my preferred weed control, but my time, energy, and patience are limited. Glyphosate is my preferred chemical means because of the low environmental persistence. Glyphosate has a non-trivial acute toxicity, but unlike many common herbicides, it breaks down fairly quickly in the environment. Another advantage is it must be absorbed by the foliage to be effective -- it doesn't travel much in the ground.
Spot spraying is my preferred herbicide technique. I don't have anything against using herbicides. My objection is to overusing or abusing herbicides. Spot spraying minimizes the use of herbicide by targeting the chemicals to exactly the plants one is attempting to remove.
I guess -- and this post is getting rather long-winded and philosophical -- that my focus is more on sustainable agriculture than on organic agriculture. I do not believe organic agriculture is necessarily sustainable. Similarly, I do not believe the judicious, limited, and targeted use of pesticides automatically renders agriculture unsustainable. I do not believe organic food is automatically "safe" or "healthy", nor do I believe pesticides are automatically "unsafe" or less healthy. I've seen too much.
In my opinion, dumping 2-4-D and Triclopyr on the lawn to prevent a few dandelions is gross abuse of herbicide and ought to be criminal. However, I have no problem spot spraying this same mixture to control poison oak. I use a lot less pesticide to control all the poison oak on my four acre property than many people use on their 1500 square foot urban lawns. I would probably end up in the hospital if I attempted to grub out all the poison oak on my property. The health risk of grubbing out the oak is probably greater than that from spraying brush killer on it. It's all a matter of quantity, degree, intensity, and options. I don't believe pesticide is always a bad option.
Please don't ask me to define sustainable agriculture. I can't do so, and I don't know of anybody who can. Of course, this might make for a very interesting side discussion ...
Yes, I am a hypocrite and probably ought to be a criminal because I sell weed and feed products five days a week as part of my day job.
Himalayan Blackberry is nasty stuff. Most of the wild blackberry in this area is a hybrid between the native Pacific Blackberry and the Himalayan Blackberry. It's aggressive, thorny, and invasive. The berries are good and for the past couple years, I've picked the berries from the arbs. Now that we want to renovate the area, however, I want the blackberries out of there. Using heavy leather gloves, I cut all the cane back and removed it for burning. Since then, I've been spraying and grubbing to remove the rest of the blackberry.
English Ivy is officially listed as a noxious weed in Oregon. Let me repeat that for the incredulous. English Ivy is on the official list of noxious weeds in the State of Oregon. After having dealt with English Ivy in this area, I am inclined to believe the listing is correct. It is invasive and very, very, hard to get rid of. I guess our climate is perfect for it.
When I cut the arbs down, I pulled up as much of the ivy as I could. I'm now in the process of repeatedly spraying and grubbing the ivy to complete the removal.
I am using Round-up -- actually a generic glyphosate that costs half as much -- mixed with a spray tracer dye to let me see exactly what I have sprayed. I highly recommend spray tracer type dyes for spot spraying because they make it so much easier to see what you're doing.
While I have the spray out, I'm also killing some quackgrass, bindweed, and other persistent perennial weeds in places where they are easy to spray without damaging desirable plants.
Mechanical means are my preferred weed control, but my time, energy, and patience are limited. Glyphosate is my preferred chemical means because of the low environmental persistence. Glyphosate has a non-trivial acute toxicity, but unlike many common herbicides, it breaks down fairly quickly in the environment. Another advantage is it must be absorbed by the foliage to be effective -- it doesn't travel much in the ground.
Spot spraying is my preferred herbicide technique. I don't have anything against using herbicides. My objection is to overusing or abusing herbicides. Spot spraying minimizes the use of herbicide by targeting the chemicals to exactly the plants one is attempting to remove.
I guess -- and this post is getting rather long-winded and philosophical -- that my focus is more on sustainable agriculture than on organic agriculture. I do not believe organic agriculture is necessarily sustainable. Similarly, I do not believe the judicious, limited, and targeted use of pesticides automatically renders agriculture unsustainable. I do not believe organic food is automatically "safe" or "healthy", nor do I believe pesticides are automatically "unsafe" or less healthy. I've seen too much.
In my opinion, dumping 2-4-D and Triclopyr on the lawn to prevent a few dandelions is gross abuse of herbicide and ought to be criminal. However, I have no problem spot spraying this same mixture to control poison oak. I use a lot less pesticide to control all the poison oak on my four acre property than many people use on their 1500 square foot urban lawns. I would probably end up in the hospital if I attempted to grub out all the poison oak on my property. The health risk of grubbing out the oak is probably greater than that from spraying brush killer on it. It's all a matter of quantity, degree, intensity, and options. I don't believe pesticide is always a bad option.
Please don't ask me to define sustainable agriculture. I can't do so, and I don't know of anybody who can. Of course, this might make for a very interesting side discussion ...
Yes, I am a hypocrite and probably ought to be a criminal because I sell weed and feed products five days a week as part of my day job.
posted by Upper Alpacas | 12:54 PM
3 Comments:
I find this very fascinating at the moment. We've hemmed and hawed about attempting to get organic certification or at least CNG cert. I, too, believe in sustainable agriculture-which can obviously mean many things to many people. One of the most serious barriers to our certification would be the use of Round-Up, which you can't have used for a minimum of 3 years to even begin your certification process. We have enormous amounts of poison ivy and as dangerous as Round-Up supposedly may (or may not) be, ridding our property of the poison ivy is far more so as I usually end up in the hospital if I get it, yet we cannot let it take over the pasture. I try not to dump a lot of synthetics or pesticides on the food I eat, but I will use fire ant killer so we can walk on our lawn without getting stung.
I think your points are valid (maybe because they are in accordance with my own) because I watch my neighbors dumping round-up and sevin and all kinds of stuff by the industrial sized container-full and I think that's wrong. It's like trying to get rid of a wasp's nest with a nuclear warhead. They shake their heads at me for my light handed spot treatments and tell me I'm just chasing my problems around, but I have far fewer pests and they're all annoyed that my vegetable garden looks so good my first year out. Like so many things in the American culture, it's not the use that is necessarily the problem, it's the abuse.
Thanks for giving us your views on this!
Jen,
If you are interested, take a look at The Tree Farm, www.thetreefarm.org. That's where I grew up -- caught between Dad's day job as a professor and his dream job of farming.
I think your goats may be able to eat poison ivy without consequence except possibly getting it on the fiber -- and scouring removes it from the fiber. Talk to somebody who knows more.
I have far less land to contend with, but I've used a similar approach to weed control by using spot application of Weed-B-Gon (and a lot of hand digging). It's not a perfect yard, but its appearance is "good enough" for me - plus, it feels healthier.
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