Independence from Glossy Buckthorn

I promised a buckthorn post, so here it is. A hat-tip to my structured water beverages too - they do seem to help my health and maybe my energy level too. I worked really hard cutting buckthorn.

Happy Independence Day US readers!

Glossy buckthorn is an invasive shrub that can grow to be a small tree. It gets berries that no animals can eat because they cause diarrhea. The leaves seem inedible to deer too.

Buckthorn roots seem designed to let the sprout snap off so the root can quickly regrow a new sprout - as if the natural environment has some water buffalo like critter that can eat the stuff and keep it from choking out everything else.

The roots are corkscrew like and the trunks seem able to grow big close to other trees and end up killing the other tree.

People have gotten used to seeing a thicket at the edge of forests or between houses, however that dense of a “privacy hedge” is not a normal part of a forest.

In my childhood, sassafras were the smaller trees under the canopy of taller trees. They like dappled light. They are edible, medicinal, and deer do eat them.

Pics (I am exhausted).

This is in the back yard. You can see how the buckthorn baggies on cut stumps, kind the edge. It was a thicket. Deer can not run through a buckthorn thicket

In the front, the buckthorn ended up being even more dense with quite a few small tree size dropping berries. Then an entire area of ground ends up covered with seedlings, still hard to pull because of the corkscrew like root.

This pic shows the front at a halfway point - one half sawed off (mostly) and the other half still a thicket. You can see I haven't cut one buckthorn that is growing right next to the larger tree. There were three others there that I already had cut. That big tree survived it. Other smaller ones further in died sometime ago and are still standing amidst buckthorn mini trees.

Here is the same tree after I cut the last buckthorn. Normal trees are not that aggressive to other trees. And I got a surprise! There was a sassafras sprout hidden among the buckthorn. Rescued!

Before I started, dense thicket that you can’t see or walk through easily:

The berries turn black/purple by fall. The flowers are tiny and greenish and are not very noticeable in the spring.

Below is the after pic with the stumps all showing. There are so many, anc so many tiny seedlings to pull, that I am going to try to compost the area instead. I covered the stumps with a thick layer of wood chips which heat up while composting. I also have weed barrier cloth that allows some water through which I will top the stumps areas with and add some more mulch to hold it done. About a year in the plastic bags should kill the root mass which is really hard to dig. I tried that and stopped trying - too dense of a root mass.

It is a big pile of mini trees and I will hire a tree company to chip them and then they can dump off chips when they have a full load.

This morning - I am tired and sore and not quite done, but really close now! I have moved about half my wood chips mound. A truckload is about the size of a minivan.

There was also a lot of poison ivy so it can compost too.

Buckthorn likes water and takes it away from other plants, along with the sunshine along southern, eastern or western edges of a yard or forest.

---

I am really impressed with the structured water coffee drink described by Dave Asprey in a video linked in this post:

*Warm/hot water - (*boiling water cracked my plastic blender container), blended with a little MCT oil, becomes cappuccino-like and I add vanilla and cardamom; rooibus suntea, and water with a little diatomaceous earth. Glass jars for the sun method do seem to be important.

The structured water, tea, or coffee, are all easier on my unhappy gut. Coffee with normal tap water heated, kind of hurts a little from the TRP channel activation I think. Rooibus made with tap water tended to make me a little gassy. I was wondering if it was affecting my microbiome growth, but the suntea doesn’t have that effect.

Something about the tap water seems to add to my TRP channel GI discomfort symptoms but I don’t know why.

Disclaimer: This information is being provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of Fair Use and is not intended to provide individual healthcare guidance.