Environmental weeds: Merrily berrying!

“A berrying we will go; a burying we will go....”   Well, not the second kind of burying, actually.

It’s remarkably easy and quick to cut the berries off the woody environmental weeds that are flourishing in our garden and in local patches of bushland.

On Sunday, in a 2-hour ‘weeding bee’ on Mt Rogers*, 8 people snipped off enough berries on twigs to fill a box trailer (with cage), packed tight, to about 1 metre deep. Just using secateurs or loppers we completely harvested the red and purple berries on bushes of Cotoneaster (Cotoneaster species), Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna), Briar rose (Rosa rubiginosa), and Privet (Ligustrum species). These woody shrubs, viciously prickly in the case of Hawthorn and Rose, have been taking over the hillside where we were working, shading out and crowding native shrubs and grasses.

There were signs that kangaroos have been roosting under one of the Privet/Hawthorn tangles, and again elsewhere under a dense Cotoneaster bush. But they can go on doing that — we only cut off the berries on Sunday; the main structure of the bushes is still there, though more open to let light through.

Autumn is the time when the berries are present and obvious, and easy to remove before the birds eat and spread them out everywhere to germinate in spring. Once spring comes, we will return to these bushes, cut the stems near the ground and dab them immediately (within 5 seconds) with weedicide. That is the best way to kill the roots, it seems, to get rid of the plants altogether.

After we’d all had a break for a cuppa and a welcome muffin, the trailer’s owner set off for the green-waste tip, taking the yield of our 16 person-hours of work.

Weeding bees once a month are a rewarding way to spend a couple of hours outdoors (especially if it’s not raining) giving oneself a glowing sense of goodness!!

In fact, I personally think that community working groups are an excellent way to tackle weed control, for species that don’t need to be sprayed in large areas (such as grasses). The more community members who join in, the more that can be done, of course. If the job were to be left entirely to government employees, it would be very costly to pay enough of them to control the woody weeds, because though easy work it’s labour-intensive.

*Mt Rogers, in the north-west part of Australian Capital Territory, is a mound 704 m above sea level (at the top), derived from volcanic activity 425 million years ago (or thereabouts). It is crowned by native bushland, and entirely ringed by suburban gardens, .and it offers fabulous views of New South Wales and Canberra. 

(Vehicles were only allowed onto this track for the working bee.)