The toxic chemicals, on the other hand, make me cringe, and I don’t think I could ever condone them, unless perhaps there was a natural, biodegradable type, as permethrin is for insects – toxic in the short term but ultimately it will degrade.

I had to go off and read about phragmites. Sounds like that is a whole other scale of problem compared to invasives in prairies. We really have made a mess of our environment in even more ways than I realized. I’ve got to be with you Carole in your campaign to raise awareness of the negative effects of invasive plants.

I have less of a problem with burning, especially in prairie situations because fire was an integral part of maintaining the prairie in that state instead of going through the normal process of succession to shrubland then woodland.

Sometimes we have to choose the method that causes the least amount of damage instead of having a best method. The work of restoration is extremely hard and very expensive, but in my mind it is absolutely necessary.

I agree with you on the pesticide aspect. Actually I was a little surprised that the Overland Park Arboretum used chemicals. But I’ve read a fair bit about best practices in prairie restoration. Some invasives can be controlled by techniques such as digging, mowing and burning. Other invasives get worse with mowing, grazing, or burning. Organic control methods tend to be very time critical and labor intensive. Either they didn’t have the labor available, or they didn’t consider it worth the extra work to do non-chemical control.

There are all kinds of rules about using equipment in fields that contain invasives too, for instance all equipment brought in needs to be thoroughly cleaned so that seeds of invasives don’t spread to the next place that piece of equipment is used. It can make mowing as a control method challenging.

Burning may sound pretty drastic, but actually it’s a natural part of the prairie life-cyle. Burning favors prairie plants and grasses, which emerge later in spring than annuals and many of the invasives. Also some of the prairie seeds actually require the heat of burning before they will germinate. Field burning is considered a best practice in prairie restoration. Over a number of years it helps to restore the prairie, though some invasives take more than a decade to control through burning. Again, timing is very critical. With just a small window of 10 days or so each spring to take care of burning there may only be a couple of days with the right conditions. It’s tricky to have people, wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity all coincide before a field becomes too green to burn successfully.