After running down electrical problems on the ATV, we tackled invasive stilt grass, mosla (“mini beefsteak”), and found a fucking HUGE privet - it was a TREE. It evaded my gestalt ID for four years because it wasn’t bushy. 5” diameter trunk! Sawed it down and treated the stump.

While this place is ours to care for I am determined to do what I can to help it be itself.

My largest complaint with Land Trusts, Nature Conservancies, etc. is they are so focused on buying land “to preserve it” but for them that means prevent housing developments and maintaining trails. They don’t actually *care* for the land they claim to own. The brushoff is always “not enough volunteers” but yet they happily do trail days, cleanup days, etc all year long with loads of volunteers…never once do I see a “privet management day”. You cant say there is no help when you *never asked to begin with*.

This area was all stiltgrass earlier this year. 0.5% gly was sprayed in late June prior to any seeding out but waiting until plants were mature and dense. This is a very low percentage that works great on stiltgrass but does not affect perminatly very many other types of plants. Now we have hawkweed and lyreleaf sage shoots (natives).

This is part of the reality of taking care of the spaces we have control over. There are many such patches here and hand weeding them all would be practically insurmountable task. Proper use and application does very little collateral damage and instead allowed native species to get a foothold while preventing the spread of an invasive.

And remember: stiltgrass is here because it was used as packaging. Plastic bubble wrap and styrofoam beans cause ecological issues for sure, but lets not pretend that “natural” or “organic” packaging is inherently better. Its more complex than buzzwords.