I'm willing to loan my lot if some one will pay the trip. :) One of the reasons I use 3 goats to roam with my sheep and current horse agistment. The goats love the weed plants and do a great job at controlling thistle, blackberry and a lot of other unamed thingies. However they are also fond of trees if they are not fenced off. Spring is really on the way here today. 18C and sunny Liz
Its beautiful here, too! Can't wait to see Spring this year, its my first year of growing plants seriously, so I'm mega excited about seeing my babies in their growth spurts. Some of my young onc. orchids are already throwing up new growth. I love this board. Must be one of the only places where you can get an offer of a loan of goats and free yard work for board in the same thread.
....goats? Then you could eat the resulting protein. I dunno...we're a hopelessly dispruptive species. Just come up with something that eats Japanese Knotweed, please. gb
interesting, on another forum I frequent there is a thread about clearing a large area of blackberry, there was suggestion that some folks have services that will 'rent' goats to individuals, fence them in with temporary fencing and let them go to town with minor supervision. The posters of that information were from the eastern US.
I have had the privilege of watching 2 goats clear about 1/2 acre of Himalayan blackberries in a few months. The property is on a route I take ocassionally (to look at their progress). Great job. The property is now pretty well bare to the ground! They are definitely not selective. Unfortunately I cannot see persuading our local municipalities to tether, corral or fence-in goats alongside the roadways to eat JK. It seems to spread along the ditches & shoulders around here. Apart from anything else, there are some ethnic groups around here that love to eat goat (as I do). I don't think they'd last long unsupervised. gb
To those of us in the Pacific NW. What about the lovely Horsetail "EQUISETUM hyemale"? Any one have a method of getting rid of it?
Ahem...! Perhaps you mean "not alien invasive". Some local plants definitely invade habitats to their liking. gb
Dear Glass Brain, Yup! When I asked of a fellow gardener, why this nasty was not in our Noxious Weed bulletin I was told ----because it's native - duh! I still want to know if and when someone comes up with something to get rid of it. Thanks, you said it much nicer. barb
Improve drainage (mechanical or soil amendment). Improve fertility (mulching, composting). Plant stuff that's a bit bigger than the horsetails are (Thank your luccky stars it's not the Carboniferous - you'd have to get an arboretum going). Encourage kids to charge around in your garden repeatedly (destroys almost all forms of vegetation - re-plant your garden when they grow up) :) gb.
Nope - you can't invade your own place, you can only invade somewhere that you're not supposed to be. Saying a native plant is invading is a bit like saying the Canadian Army is invading Canada - it's a linguistic oxymoron.
I disagree with Michael, since his definition of what constitutes its "own place" is not clear . If "its own space" is taken to mean a natural environment where a plant's growth is controlled by the predatory actions of native animals or insects and/or by competition from other native plants, then most plants are not invasive since the ecosystem is in balance. If a location is in the plants normal range and provides only conditions which give a plant a competitive advantage (more fertile or less compacted soil, reliable moisture due to watering etc.), without the controls then it may become invasive. Also, the Pacific Northwest is not a single ecosystem and therefore there are places where, once established a plant native to somewhere in the region may be considered to have invaded an area where it would not normally have survived or spread. If the Vancouver police department used its resources to overpower and take control of the small town of Mill Bay, it would probably be viewed by many as an invasion even though both places are in BC and the police were only behaving as they normally did at home.