Help bring wildlife back to Manor Park: Volunteer with Invasive Species Action Team
Project aims to improve local ecosystems by removing common buckthorn, dog-strangling vine
The Manor Park Community Association Environmental Sustainability Committee is pleased to introduce the Invasive Species Eradication Project. The project will recruit, equip, and train community volunteers to create an Invasive Species Action Team. This team will remove invasive species across Manor Park.
We have applied for more than $3,000 of funding from Ontario’s Invasive Species Centre to buy tools to create an Invasive Species Tool Kit including saws, pruners, spades, trowels, garden knives, weed wrenches, and safety gear.
What’s the problem?
This project aims to improve local ecosystems by removing invasive species that disrupt food webs and decrease biodiversity. Our focus will be on common buckthorn and dog-strangling vine.
Both buckthorn and dog-strangling vine are European species. Their seeds spread by birds and by the wind. Buckthorn is a large shrub that is found mostly in forests, forest edges, and under backyard trees, especially coniferous trees. Check your yard this spring for buckthorn seedlings and for mystery shrubs that may be buckthorn.
Dog-strangling vine threatens monarch butterflies. They mistake the vine for a native milkweed species, lay their eggs, and then the caterpillars starve to death. Monarch caterpillars can only survive on native milkweeds such as butterfly milkweed and swamp milkweed, both suitable for Manor Park gardens and balconies.
Neither buckthorn nor dog-strangling vine are commercially available. However, other invasive species include commercially available goutweed, periwinkle, burning bush, and barberry. Many Manor Park gardens have these species, and unfortunately, they spread to natural areas, including the Caldwell-Carver Conservation Area, by birds and the wind.
We hope to have our Tool Kit available to residents who choose to remove these species from their gardens and need specialized tools to remove them. One of these strong, mechanical tools, a weed wrench can lever buckthorn, burning bush, and barberry roots out of the ground.
St. Columba Anglican Church yard
Over the past three years, our committee has been helping remove invasive species at the Manor Park Community Centre on Thornwood Ave, Manor Park Public School, St. David and St. Martin Church, The Lancaster condominium on Alvin Road, and a Manor Park Estates garden.
Our current focus is the extensive grounds of St. Columba Anglican Church on Sandridge Road. We are grateful for the incredible support from parish administrator Diana Poitras and from the congregation. Through no fault of their own, St. Columba’s woodland areas have become infested by buckthorn, brought by birds.
Unfortunately, commercially available invasive species — including periwinkle and burning bush — have been planted here by well-intentioned gardeners. We envision a revitaliszed woodland ecosystem throughout the St. Columba grounds with no invasive species and thousands of native plant species.
Our goal was aided last November by Ottawa’s 63rd Scout group heaped mountains of mulch on top of goutweed in the church’s backyard. Goutweed is a very difficult plant to eradicate, and the best method is to suppress it with cardboard and mulch over several years.
The Scouts and Cubs have also been busy with winter sowing thousands of native plant seeds and they will be planting these seedlings out this spring. Thank you, Scouts and Cubs!
Buckthorn is also a difficult plant to remove. The usual method is to dig out new plants when young or to use a weed wrench once the plant is over a few feet tall. We hope to buy two of these expensive, specialized tools with our grant. In the meantime, we have been tackling dozens of buckthorns in the church yard with a new method called high-cutting.
High-cutting is an effective, low-cost removal technique for buckthorns that you can also use in your own yard. Cut it down at four feet high. Then, over one or two years, remove any new leaf shoots from the tall stump. Eventually, it will die, and the roots will be easy to pull out.
Volunteer with us
We need your help so that the Manor Park Invasive Species Eradication Project can succeed. You can assist us with winter sowing, spring sowing, planting, and at our removal events. Get in touch at manorpark.environment@gmail.com to join the Invasive Species Action Team email list and follow the Manor Park Environmental Sustainability Committee on social media.
Christina Keys is a wildlife gardener and garden designer with ecological gardening company Garden ReLeaf. She is also a MPCA Environmental Sustainability Committee volunteer.
Common buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) spreads aggressively by birds eating the berries. Check your yard for mystery shrubs and seedlings; the leaves and bark are very distinct.