Restoring Bottomland Prairie, April 2016, Part 4: The Vetch Stretch, cont.--The Bad News

The bad news is that I found Crown Vetch in the Creek Field!  The burn revealed it, a circle about 20 yards in diameter, bright green in color.   The fire had gone right over it.   

Digging up a patch of
Crown Vetch left a temporary
bare spot in the Creek Field.

I tried digging it up the minute I saw it, but the ground was hard, and the clods hurt my hands.  However, it rained that night and the next, and after that I was able to reach down into the earth and pull up roots and rhizomes.  I was so frantic to do it that I didn't think to take a photo until the vetch was all gone (at left).

Crown Vetch re-sprouts next to
the flag that marks the spot
where Crown Vetch had
somehow hop-scotched 
into the Creek Field.

I flagged the spot, so I could find it for re-checking.

I did re-check a week later and found several tiny sprouts, which I quickly dug up.

Where had the Crown Vetch come from?

At no point had a patch of Crown Vetch in the buffer simply expanded until it crossed the path that separates the buffer from the field.  

However, seeds were another story.   Seeds could have been transported by wildlife or carried by wind or water.

And there was a seed source nearby--a patch of vetch on the buffer overlooking this part of the field.   Usually, land slopes down to a creek.  But Jerry Cameron, the previous owner, had thrown up a dike along this stretch of bank, so that the buffer sloped up.   Seeds on that spot could wash downward, toward the field.

I'm sitting on the ground, scooting
my way up the dike, digging vetch
as I go.  

Having been reconfigured by earth movers, the area was incredibly disturbed.   It used to be a Poison Hemlock forest, but after several years of control, it had become a Poison Hemlock savannah.   Large patches of Crown Vetch linked the toxic plants.  


I started at the bottom of the dike and worked my way upward, clearing the vetch as I went.

Oh, how I thanked the rains that made the digging easy!

Here a stone protects a Crown
Vetch caudex and covers up
the roots, making the plant harder
to dig out.    In the undisturbed parts of the
buffer, the soil goes deep
before it hits stones.  

However, the disturbance of the soil meant rocks near the surface, rocks that sometimes gave my hands an unpleasant scrape.  

On top of the dike, an elderberry
seedling is surrounded by vetch.

This elderberry seedling has been
liberated from the vetch!

After several days, the built up dike
was cleared of vetch.  The green bunches
in the upper right are Poison Hemlock.

While I was clearing the Crown Vetch, the Poison Hemlock was greening up.   The photo at left, upper righthand corner, shows at least six hemlock clumps.

I will work on them another day.

Meanwhile, clearing the vetch off the dike will hopefully stop Crown Vetch seed-pods from raining down on the Creek Field.  

That's enough about bad news!

The good news is in the previous post, just below this one.