A snip here, a snip there

Yesterday I cleared the bayberry heath of bittersweet and dewberry. The latter is alive and well as it ha not been a target of my spraying. The bittersweet was not thriving but is also not completely dead. I found one egg case for a mantis and a mushroom. Here are before and after photos.

 

In an area along the southern border of the meadow where the Monarch caterpillars had been chewing the different milkweed, I cut bittersweet. Much of it is so dead that only bear stalks remain. And of course, root. It was easier just to tug on the dead stems and sometimes root came out as well. The root I could pull easily is not healthy. This praying mantis was in the area. I have come upon 5 egg cases for mantises.

Today I worked in the switchgrass section off the path to the beehives. The switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), planted in 2006, has overrun the little bluestem although the B. Trefoil, a legume and not a native, remains in the understory. Bittersweet has not been able to get established in this section but the dewberry has. The B. Trefoil, at the same level as the dewberry, seems at risk for being choked out. So I clipped dewberry.

I also cut to the ground as many bittersweet stems as I could in an area adjacent to the switchgrass where I had pulled bittersweet by the root in the early spring before the herbicide plan took shape. Dewberry came out with the bittersweet wherever they were intertwined.