Our invasive removal project

Chapel Road Park and the land across the street in Frosty Meadows had been owned by a hog farmer. He did some quarrying on the edge of the ridge - you can still see the place where the rock was cut. On the northern border of the park is another ridge which is what remains of a railroad bed that was put up parallel to the Alexandria and Orange line soon after the Civil War. The bridge abutments were finished but the creeks were not actually bridged when the company went bankrupt. You can still see the ghost of this enterprise as it runs all across the county.

What a gem of a park! All sorts of ecosystems are held in this small space: creek, woods, swamp, marsh, grassy field, ridge. Just beautiful at all times of year, and very lightly visited by humans. It has been an official FCPA Invasive Management Area since 2015. (Actually, it was a site years before - the sign is still there - but records of who was managing it are not available.) Volunteers come for a couple hours at a time and work as best they can considering that we are not allowed to use power tools or herbicides. We started out by working on the vines - Japanese Honeysuckle, Oriental Bittersweet and Mulitflora Rose - that had grown up and were threatening the line of trees along the "intermittent stream" that divides the two fields (actually an old farm ditch). All those trees were planted in the early 1990s as seedlings and have since grown tall, but the vines grew with them and had pulled down a few of the trees.

After that, we tackled the couple hundred large Autumn Olive trees that were swallowing the park. Of course, they resprouted worse than before,, so we gave up on that, and FCPA paid a professional company to cut them down at the base and paint herbicide on the stumps. Success! The park is transformed. We pulled up a lot of saplings by hand with an "Extratigator." We will need to be constantly vigilant to find new seedlings when berries are brought in by birds from neighboring properties.

In the northeast corner were large numbers of Japanese Barberry shrubs. With a lot of work over several years, we have gotten a lot of them out.

Throughout the park are huge numbers of Multiflora Rose shrubs. A big volunteer group chopped down all the ones on the open field on the west side in early 2020. We will plan to continue to chop away at them.

Mile-a-Minute first appeared maybe four years ago. It was terrible in 2019, but in 2020 there is less, so hopefully that means our efforts are paying off.

Lesser Celandine also appeared a couple years ago. We tried digging it out, making a big mess of the ground, but it came back the following year exactly the same as if we had never bothered. Gloria from Fairfax IMA has sprayed it with herbicide. Hopefully we have some chance of eradicating it, as there is not that much of it yet.

The eastern field was used for years for parking for Clifton Day, until one year when there had been a lot of rain and multiple cars got stuck in the mud. FCPA continued to mow for a few years, but then a six inch rainstorm one June washed out the park entrance. FCPA fixed it, but it quickly washed away again. Only an SUV or truck can get in there now. Since they stopped mowing, what had been sterile lawn has grown into a beautiful field, full of flowers and butterflies. Hopefully it will remain so, though there is also a gas pipeline that cuts across diagonally, so that part at least will be mowed every few years. That is just as well, as it will prevent forest succession and let us keep this precious grassland.

Posted on July 13, 2020 10:29 PM by mefisher