JUST DO NOT DO IT!
BY DON DOUCETTE
Our two Rumford plants pictured above are engaged in soundless combat as each competes for sunlight and growing space and most likely our flowering plant will eventually lose its battle to exist.
The flowering specimen is a native Jerusalem artichoke otherwise known as sunroot, sunchoke or earth apple. This plant is native to North America and is long a staple tuber food used by our native American cousins while often added to clay pot game stews or fire roasted.
The Jerusalem artichoke was introduced to Europe and yet remains a cultivated plant – in Germany, the tubers are distilled into brandy a.k.a. schnapps.
Online photo examples indicate a wide range of possible gourmet-type dishes prepared with edible Jerusalem artichoke tubers.
Draped above the cluster of Jerusalem artichoke flowers, the creeping glossy vine displaying green immature berries is Asiatic bittersweet and is a hideously aggressive non-native invasive plant found throughout the Ten Mile River Watershed – a no tolerance strategy is suggested for property owners and recommended that no part of this twining and smothering plant be introduced to any land holding. Learn to identify the post-emmergent embryo plant to best enable decisive elimination in its early growth stage.
Ripe bittersweet berries with vines are beguilingly beautiful and often hung on structures or used for center pieces as holiday decor, usually during and after the Thanksgiving holiday. Best advice by this chronicler, just don’t do it!
A substantial list of invasive plants (consult IPANE Atlas) are attacking native plants within the Ten Mile Watershed. The battle is silent with no distant din of artillery or clatter of armored cat-tracks, yet the engagement is serious while our native plant community becomes overwhelmed.
Please join the battle, learn to identify and eliminate non-native invasive plants, early and often.
Don Doucette
“Ten Mile River Rambles”
Friends of the Ten Mile
Citizen of the Ten Mile River Watershed