Buckthorn Bustin’ – Part 2
Johnsonburg, Pa.: There’s a saying we just learned about buckthorn: “It consumes all the nutrients and space, and doesn’t contribute to habitat”. The thirty plus attendees at Part 2 of the Buckthorn Workshop in Johnsonburg, sponsored by the Allegheny Forest Health Collaborative (AFHC), left the workshop with that saying burned into their brain.
The AFHC started day 2 of their workshop by reiterating the biology of buckthorn and a few other highly invasive plant species, and different herbicide methods that can potentially manage these plant pests in our woods. The attendees then traveled to the Rolfe Beagle Club to view the different herbicide work done a month earlier at the club. Lots of dead leaves to look at, but as instructor Art Gover stressed, “Managing buckthorn is a double treatment process. The first treatment gets a majority of the buckthorn if done properly, but you have to come back the next growing season and treat the new shoots coming in. Double treatment is a strategy you need to incorporate into your buckthorn management”.
While at the Rolfe Beagle Club, the attendees got to see the end result of the following herbicide treatments:
Foliar (leaves) spray,
Basal bark spray,
Hack and squirt,
Root pulling, and
Cut stump treatments.
A second major piece of advice from Art was that you need to go into your woods armed with the tools that will give you the capability to treat most invasive plant species you might find in your woods. Nobody wants to walk back home or to the vehicle to switch out herbicide because you need a different herbicide to manage a different invasive plant species. Art explained how to mix certain types of herbicides that would allow a landowner to manage the most common invasive species here in NC PA: buckthorn, autumn olive, multi-flora rose, and oriental honeysuckles.
Calibration, the science of determining how to get the right amount of herbicide on the ground to comply with the herbicide label guidelines, was the third facet of the training.
Invasive plant species affect our northern forests and the wildlife that need these forests to thrive. The AFHC sponsored this FREE workshop for landowners so that landowners can help provide the habitat that wildlife need, and protect the forests our grandchildren will use in the future. The AFHC was joined by the Elk, Potter and McKean County Conservation Districts, APIPMA (Allegheny Plateau Invasive Plant Management Area) and the USDA, Allegheny National Forest.
Additional information on buckthorn can be found at the Center for Private Forests, or on the Facebook Page, Allegheny Forest Health Collaborative.