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Photo below by Catharine Kendall at the Ohio River Bluffs
Annual Garlic
Plucking Volunteer Days
1)
Highlands Nature Sanctuary, Museum Parking Lot
directions
2)
Ohio
River Bluffs
directions
3)
Spruce
Hill directions
4) Mother's
Day at Miller State Nature Preserve
directions If you have young folks interested: Because this work takes long stretches of unbroken concentration and careful dexterity, we have found young people 15 and younger tend to wear out after just a few hours and don't usually enjoy themselves. Therefore we don't normally recommend bringing teens younger than 16 to this event, but we trust your judgment if you feel you have one or two young adults exceptionally suited to this task. Prepare to enjoy... The woodlands are beautiful this time of year in both locations - the trees are unfolding and are filled with the return of tanagers, grosbeaks and warblers, all in full song. Walking through the quiet woods, in the relaxed company of others -- though concentrating on a task -- allows one to gain almost a meditative peacefulness in the camaraderie. CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR ONE OR MORE DAYS
Background. We have been attending to removing
non-native garlic mustard in our preserves for years, but the year 2008
was a major wake-up call, and we have been exceptionally attentive ever
since. For the
first time, we realized we could actually
lose the native
understory of some of our hard-won preserves if we weren't really
perseverant. Scanning the entire 4000 acre preserve
system for colonies of garlic mustard, each with the capacity to grow
and spread, is now something we know we must do thoroughly, every single
year, without fail. It's an immense task, one that requires LOTS
of volunteer help -- a true community of effort -- to successfully
accomplish. Maybe that's what garlic mustard came here to do for us
Americans - to teach us that nothing truly important can be done without
effort, and the virtues of community, earnest hard work, and
non-procrastination. In regard to the latter, there is only a 10-14 day
window in which to effectively act each year to weed garlic
mustard--falling at a time when almost everyone is hearing the siren
call of their gardens and yards. Regardless, it is a task that can't be
deferred to a more convenient time. To successfully remove garlic mustard from any one
site requires complete 100% weeding of the species over
Of our 14 preserves, the most severely
threatened areas in the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System are
undoubtedly the Ohio River Bluffs Preserve on the Ohio River; and our
oldest and largest preserve, the Highlands Nature Sanctuary where the
garlic mustard has gotten a head-start along the canyon floor of the
Rocky Fork Creek and several side tributaries, and Spruce Hill which was
only recently acquired with a problem already established.
First of all, garlic mustard is not "bad." It is a perfectly well-behaved and community-minded plant at home in the British Isles where it grows in modest numbers along streams and floodplains. However, it is one of many plant species that reached our continent without its assemblage of inter-dependent comrades, species that keep it in balance in its native home such as seed-devouring fungi and beetles. In England, the biennial Garlic mustard is naturally adapted to soils disturbed by flooding, and when it first established itself in Eastern USA's woodlands in the nineteen sixties and seventies, it exploded in numbers. It is easily observed that garlic mustard makes its entry most readily into forests that have suffered some disturbance to the soil, most commonly after a severe logging when the soils have been opened up by logging roads and heavy equipment. Once garlic mustard gets established, it usually over time sows itself so thickly on the forest floor that our perennial native wildflower species - their populations already highly diminished by human disruption - begin to disappear in its wake. Garlic Mustard Feast below. Garlic Mustard is a delicious cooked green when added to a number of recipes.
There is no use blaming garlic mustard
for its fecundity - plants are devoid
of malice. Perhaps we could blame ourselves for bringing it
Connecting is the
first step.
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a span of seven
years. After that time, relatively easy maintenance keeps it garlic
mustard-free. 
dustrial practices
-- open, sunny, disturbed ground. Plant immigration is nothing new - the
process is literally as old as the hills. Most of the 2000 native plant
species of Ohio, if you go back in time long enough, came from somewhere
else, just like most of us did. So what makes garlic mustard so "bad?"
over to our
country with such a sense of incaution, or for causing so much
unprecedented soil erosion in our forests and fields, thereby inviting
in a new species to cover our wounds. Or perhaps we could humbly admit
that we may be seeing in garlic mustard's "aggression," simply a mirror
of our own, since we too are rapidly taking over the world as a single
species. Or, perhaps we can choose to blame neither ourselves nor the
mustard plant, and simply accept the inevitable impact of our one-world economy on
diverse landscapes that have heretofore grown for eons in isolation. Guilty or innocent, we must accept the reality that
collectively our species is sowing the seeds of a new world, and now we
must choose with our actions what we want that world to look like. We hope that you will
find yourself admiring of garlic mustard's vitality and lime-green
radiance. We also hope you choose to weed it, not as an enemy, but with
the calm determination of a person who has made a choice for native
bio-diversity, and will continue to weed until that day when the
garlic mustard finds its natural balance in the new world. And that day
shall surely come, because it is the nature of things. Let's hope we
learn to do the same!