Beechwood Estates | Athens Ohio | Route 50

The Association dues help keep Beechwood Estates a wonderful place to live. The fee covers property taxes and insurance for community areas of the neighborhood such as the lake and the land surrounding the lake. It also pays for electricity for our two security streetlights and to occasionally stock the lake with carp, which helps to keep the lake clear.

Read more here and print out this PDF to send in with your check:

http://beechwoodofathens.com/pdf/2008.pdf

Dear Beechwood Residents,

You may have heard about the threat of garlic mustard. It is an invasive plant that threatens to dominate the understory of our woods and crowd out native plant species. We have plenty of it in the woods of Beechwood, and I urge of you to consider eradicating it from your land. It is an attractive plant with white flowers, but it spreads very quickly and will eventually choke out other plants. Below is a link to Michigan State’s information website and to an article from the Post.

http://www.ipm.msu.edu/garlicmustard.htm

If you would like to eliminate the plant from your land, the time to act is now (this week!) before the plant goes to seed. The best way to eradicate the plant is to pull it out by the root and then remove the plant from the area—just send it out with the garbage. Cutting it is helpful, but not enough; it needs to be removed by the root. It is easy to uproot. (Apparently, this is one of only a few plants that deer won’t eat!)

Please see the Michigan State website for a discussion of management options.

If you would like help in identifying garlic mustard and/or eliminating it, I will be glad to come to your house and check to see if you have it. I am also willing to eliminate the plant.

Please send me an email at Jokisch@ohio.edu or give me a call at 593-3221.

Thank you,

Brad Jokisch

http://www.ipm.msu.edu/garlicmustard.htm

Helping the habitat, one yank at a time
One in a series of stories for Earth Week, April 12-22, 2008

Apr 15, 2008
By Laura Yates

Athens is being invaded, and the intruders could be hiding in your own backyard.

Garlic mustard, a biennial herb with heart-shaped, ridged leaves and imprinted veins, has been creeping about Athens, Ohio, for more than 25 years. With its enthusiastic reproductive ability, which can produce as many as 20,000 seedlings per square meter, garlic mustard poses a serious threat to native wildflowers and ferns.

Luckily, students and area residents have the opportunity to fight back. For the next three weekends, garlic-mustard pulls will be held at various publicly owned natural areas, and all you need to do to participate is show up.

Each pull begins with a quick lesson on identifying the garlic-mustard plant so that no native plants are inadvertently harmed. The herb is visually distinctive, but participants can double check their selections by crumpling up a leaf to see if it produces a strong garlic smell. Garlic mustard tends to grow in clumps.

“The problem with garlic mustard is that is has no natural predators. If the deer would just eat it, we probably wouldn’t have such a problem, said David Tees, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy who leads several of the pulls. “We’re essentially acting as the herbivores during the pulls.”

Though there are other invasive species in the region, garlic mustard is especially threatening because of the number of seeds produced by each plant and their ability to remain dormant for up to 11 years.

Professor of Environmental and Plant Biology Phil Cantino has been organizing garlic-mustard pulls for more than 10 years.

His crusade started in 1981 when he first discovered the plants growing in what is now the Ridges Land Lab. By 1998, he was fighting the flora along the Hockhocking-Adena Bikeway and, in 2005, he got reinforcements. Now, the annual pulls are organized by the Athens Forest Stewardship Club in collaboration with Rural Action, the Appalachian Ohio Group of the Sierra Club, Athens Conservancy, Athens Trails and Friends of Strouds Run State Park.