Growing Home Part I

      My husband and I purchased our home two years ago. The yard was entirely overgrown with blackberry bushes, flag irises, and weeds. We spent the first two summers just cleaning up the place, and we certainly have the scars to prove it! Now that the ‘dirty’ work is done, we’re ready to make it look like home. We’d like to do that as fiscally and environmentally responsible as possible, and I’d like to ask you to join me along the way. I’ll be using the information from our website to help with this task.

     Our challenges are many in this venture, and we’ll have to tackle them one by one. Up first is the front side of the house. Our house is built into a hill, and as a result, we have a lot of retaining walls. These step-down flower beds are great, but they have a lot of treated wood. We know the dangers of treated wood containing formaldehyde and will be replacing it in time to come. For now, we are going to work on the beds themselves.

  
     First things first, these bad boys need to be completely demolished. The large, tall, grassy looking bunches are yellow flag irises. The root systems are CRAZY. The individual plants are actually all interconnected through their rhizome root systems. The roots are far reaching and difficult to control. These are extremely invasive, and when our run off collects rhizomes from them, they spread into our water-ways. These can be poisonous to animals, and handling parts of flag irises can cause skin irritation and allergic reactions, so we will need to be sure to wear our gloves. The rhizomes from these plants can fracture off and grow again, which is why wide-spread tilling is not recommended. Control takes several years to succeed. 

     With all this in mind, we have decided to start the attempt of removing these beasts. We will be digging up and hand removing the root systems. As you can see here, a shovel wasn’t getting the job done. We had go with a good old fashioned pickaxe to pull up the roots. I sorted through the systems by hand to ensure all parts were removed. It was a serious labor of time, but I wanted these guys GONE. Thanks to a large amount of root rot, we may have been more successful than normal. However, chances are that next year, we will be going after them again. 

This is why it is so important to use careful selection in what you plant. Once invasive species take off, they are a real gripe to get under control.

The BIG deal about INVASIVES!

Most of us reading this blog are pretty aware of invasive species. We can agree that they are bad and we need to pay extra close attention to what we are putting into the ground. They choke out the native plants and tend to spread like wildfire and eventually we have a yard full of a plants that we thought looked cool or was pretty.

Take a drive outside of the city and look at the majority of the plants in our forests. You may see huge NATIVE Douglas fir trees. These trees are a huge part of our economy! Don't we want to protect them? What else might you see? How about that INVASIVE ivy climbing up that Douglas Fir tree? Or those green bushes with the pretty yellow flowers blooming on them right now, also known as Scotch Broom, which is INVASIVE.

The Nature Conservancy has some alarming facts on how much damage these invasive plants can do. Not only to our land, but also to our economy. For a little tease to get you to click on the link, it costs the United States economy about 120 BILLION a year! This website also shows some ways that you can help with getting rid of these invasive plants.

Here is also a LINK with a list of all of the known invasive plants in Oregon by the USDA.

Invasion of the Invasives!

One of the topics that we first introduced on our blog this term was the fact that while $45 billion is spent on manicuring and maintaining lawns, another $100 billion in damage results from the irresponsible planting of invasive species.  Because next to no legislation is currently in place it is up to us to make a change.  To check out an interesting article about invasive plant species and what we can do to help stop this problem CLICK HERE.  If you do decide to check out the site make sure that you explore some of the links at the bottom of the page.