12/5/09 Morning frost and the physics of leverage
If you think it’s hard to distinguish the native trailing blackberry from the invasive Himalayan blackberry, imagine them both covered in a layer of frost on a cold, bright morning. Luckily, we were working in a slow-growing patch of sun up at Pigeon Point Park and the frost melted away pretty quickly. We have been doing a lot of maintenance up at this site lately, and we spent the morning tending to an area that hadn’t received any love in a few months. Volunteers warmed themselves by pulling out blackberry that was coming up and threatening plants we put in the ground last year. When I say pulling, I mean it literally because we tried to limit our tool usage so as not to disturb the mulch too much. Mulch acts as a barrier between the nutrient rich soil it is covering and invasive seeds looking for a place to plant themselves. As with any barrier, mulch becomes much less effective when it has a bunch of holes in it, so we yanked the blackberry up by hand. This may sound ridiculous, but I promise that there is a way to do this without getting poked too badly by thorns- come out with us and I’ll show you!
After we cleared that area of blackberry, we took a break and then gathered the weed wrenches and headed to a big patch of Scot’s broom and apple rootstock. Davis, a good friend of buphalo’s, played us sweet songs on the guitar and we cleared 1,070 sq.ft. of the two invasive shrubs. The weed wrench won at least a few votes for favorite tool, if you have ever used one you know why. If you haven’t ever used one, there are still some pretty big Scot’s broom waiting to be wrenched out up at Pigeon Point!
