I was contacted recently by the Puget Sound Early College to organize an opportunity for them to do community service and restoration. So last Friday, 80 students, 6 teachers and I went out to Brooklake to do some blackberry removal. If you haven't been out there recently, the blackberry is coming in and is requiring work every few months. (Unfortunately, blackberry isn't the only problem out there, we also have a few thistles to deal with too, but that wasn't our focus on this day...)
It was a beautiful fall day in the Pacific Northwest, meaning it was cool and drizzley, which generally makes for great restoration weather, in my opinion.
We didn't get too hot, no-one got dehydrated, no-one got smacked in the face with a blackberry cane. All-in-all everyone agreed that this was much better than the last time we all worked together, where all of these things happened. (The blackberry in the face was unintentional-an accident of not looking where you are tossing things with large thorns).
We had a larger area to work in this time, which allowed everyone to spread out a little better than before, thereby reducing the incidences of berry-cane face-smacking.
These 3 hard-working ladies had no assistance with this spot. They focused on an area, and cleared it-the best tactic when working with blackberry. They should be proud.
This group found an insidious Himalayan blackberry plant that had located itself at the base of a blueberry, and was surrounded by native blackberries, both of which we wanted to preserve. They devised a strategy to cut the invasive canes so that they could effectively target the root, while doing as little damage to the native plants as possible.
From the size of this root, I would say that this blackberry has been cut several times before, but that because of its proximity to plants we wanted to preserve, no-one ever tried to remove the root.
Until now. What a beast.
I love working with this age group (16-18-ish). One of the most wonderful things about them is their honesty and bluntness (I was told by someone that he liked removing scotch broom much better than the blackberry we were doing). I also really appreciate the questions that they presented me with-really hard ethical questions that I wonder about too. Are we working against evolution to be selecting plants that "should" be here, and removing ones that "shouldn't?" Isn't that the process of natural selection, that a plant migrates to an area, adapts to that area, and is eventually native? The only answers I can come up with are the method of introduction and time scale. Humans have been the primary method of introduction for most plants we have problems with in the area. People have brought plants from elsewhere to an area where they do not have any natural conrols, such as animals that eat them. This kind of plant invasion has happened just in the past 200 or so years, not long enough for adaptation to occur. These invasive plants are very competitive, will crowd out native plants, and ultimately create a monoculture. It is the monoculture that I work against. Ultimately, I believe that diversity is necessary to functional natural ecology. It's pretty important for functional human ecology, but that is another subject entirely.
Thank you PSEC for your hard work Friday, and I look forward to speaking and working with you again soon.