Artisode; Salt Cedar Invasion

An invasive species is one of those species that's not native to the area. It has come in and it out competes the native species. In the reograined the natural system is called a bosky which has cottonwoods, willows, and what has come in is salt cedar. Salt cedar is one of the more problematic due to its nature. It plants easily. It grows up from seeds or from rhizomes which are the soil so that other plants can't grow around it after a few years. And therefore it takes all of the water, all the nutrients, and all the space, and all the sun from the other plants. Salt cedar is native to Asia Minor or the middle part of Asia. The ones we have here usually from Afghanistan in that area. So this plant was brought here because they thought it was an ornamental. It was very pretty sometimes called a smoke tree just because of its filamentous leaves and everything from a

distance. The salt cedar really changes everything about the habitat. From the water or hydrology it will suck up about 200 gallons of water a day per plant. And what's left is salts from that water that is concentrated in their leaves. That's the name salt cedar. These leaves shed every winter. They fall to the ground, they condition the soil then, and nothing else can grow around them because it's too salty. It's making its own bed just for itself and it's offspring to grow. This plant is really strange in a lot of different ways. It knows how to survive, and I often term it as it's from Mars because you just can't kill it. I tell people about how we eradicate the thing. You can cut it and next year it'll spring back with all these shoots, about

five or ten different ones from your cutting. So you can burn it. It loves that. It'll come back with 15 shoots and it'll continue to go because it's got more nutrients in the root systems. Then you can even spray it with an herbicide, which we don't like to do, but that may be the last course. Well, it'll drop all of its leaves, laugh at you, and then come back the next year just as strong as it was before. Salt Cedar has no natural predator over here. There's a two -week period or about in the fall where it is going dormant. It's going to drop its leaves, but it's sending all of its nutrients down into its root system. That's when you need to hit it with an herbicide. If you hit it any other time of the year, it'll drop its leaves and come back next year. But when it takes it to the roots, it uses up all of its energy trying to outgrow this herbicide, and it actually kills

itself. One thing I might say is we should all be very conscious of bringing in invasive plants, because we find out a lot of these invasive species can double their numbers or double their size in one year. It's no time to wait. We need to get on with it right now, and we should all take it to heart. This is not just that fellow's land or that national wildlife refuge. It's for everybody, and everybody has a stake in it.