Valley Forge

Oh Valley Forge....I have to say that this seemed like the longest Spike ever! When we got our assignment for our Valley Forge spike it said that we would be doing a lot of invasive species removal....for those of you that don't know, invasive species removal is a fancy term for weeding. So we thought we were preparing ourselves for six weeks of weeding this plant that is called "Mile-a-minute". Named because it can grow about six inches every day!

When we got to Valley Forge we got a quick tour of the visitors center. Then we got back in our van and followed Ernestine (our sponsor) to our housing. We drove throughout the entire park before we finally reach this road that was a dead end into our house. The house looked amazing! It was so big and out in the middle of no-where, but the scenery was gorgeous! We had a yard which was lined by woods and a grave driveway on the front of our house. On the back of the house there was more woods and a river. The house that we stayed in was actually General Lafayette's Quarters and it was ginormous. We had a huge kitchen, living room, dining room and attic, washer and dryer, three bathrooms, and five bedrooms. There was also a porch off of the side of the house and picnic tables in our yard. I would have to say that the only bad part about the house was the stink bugs. These things were everywhere! At first we would kill them, but then there were would be this bad smell (hence the name "stink bug"). So we resorted to grabbing them with toilet paper and flushing them down the toilet....it seemed to work pretty good.

For the first few days at Valley Forge we were in orientation. This was an orientation for the entire summer staffers, so most of the information was stuff we didn't really need to know, but it was still sort of interesting. After our orientation was over we finally got to work. Now, before we arrived at Valley Forge, Colleen gave us a run down of what things we need to be careful of out in the woods.....I am not a nature person and never intend to become a nature person. Colleen told us that we would be working around deer ticks, so we needed to check ourselves every day when we got home so we didn't get lime disease. Also, there are copperhead snakes in these woods, we might not see them, but they are out there. This info definitely freaked me out....deer ticks? NO THANK YOU! For our first day of actual work in the field we met our new boss named Kate....who is the nicest and funniest lady that is very passionate about her job (it makes sense cause she graduated from U of M!) Kate showed us the plant that we would be ripping out of the ground for the next 6 weeks. Then, we started pulling.

Mile-a-minute is a plant that I have come to spot from 5 miles away.....I even see it when I close my eyes at night. It's actually really easy to spot this plant once you know what it looks like because it has very distinct characteristics. It's leaves are triangle in shape (we always said like Doritos), at the base of each leaf is a circular leaf that wraps around the stem, and the stem has little prickers on it. We ended up picking mile-a-minute almost every single day.....most of the time it wasn't for the entire day though.

When we weren't picking mile-a-minute we were removing other invasives such as; Miscanthus, Japanese Knotweed and Stilt Grass, Wisteria and Crayfish.

Miscanthus is actually something that is found in suburban areas and is used for landscaping. It looks pretty in neighborhoods, but when it starts to spread to open fields it can become a nu sense. They grow in bundles and are taller and thicker than regular grass. To manage these plants we took sheers and cut the miscanthus as low to the ground as we could. Then we took this really thick black tarp and laid it over the area. Last we took a few cinder blocks and placed them on the edges of the tarp. We did this in order to suffocate the plant so that it could grow anymore. We did this technique on 2 fields. Which was about 30 miscanthus. This was done the second week that we were in VF, so during the last week we went back to check the progress of our work and see if anything had grown back. What we did worked!

Japanese Knotweed is a plant whose leaves look like marijuana leaves. Japanese Stilt Grass....is just a very light green colored grass which has actually taken over a lot of the ground at Valley Forge. This grass is especially bad because it over powers the native plants, so when you're standing in a field looking out at the forest, underneath the tree line there is no understory. The Japanese Stilt Grass has taken over. The reason that this plant has had more success growing than others is that the deer don't eat it. Valley Forge has a huge deer population, which is also part of the problem with the native plants. In a healthy environment there should only be about 10-12 deer per square mile.....Valley Forge has about 80 per square mile (if I'm remembering correctly). So, when the deer eat the native plants it gives room for the invasive ones to move in.

Wisteria is a vine that grows up into the tree tops, weighs the trees down and ends up killing them. Our job in this was to take sheers and snip the vine in several places.....as low as we could go and as high as we could reach. We couldn't pull the vines out of the trees because they were tangled so badly that it would have hurt the tree. So, we would cut them and leave them until they dried up.

Catching Crayfish was a lot of fun. Not all the Crayfish were invasives. The difference in these guys was that the invasives were called "Rustie's", named for this rusty spot that they had on the sides of their exoskeleton and top of their heads. Also, the invasives were a different color than the natives......Rustie's were more of a bluish-green color while natives were a pinkish-peachy color. The Rustie's had come over from the Ohio river and invaded the Schukyll (not sure how it's spelled). To erradicate these guys we would get our wadders on and grad a finishing net. Then, we would stand in the river and place our nets down stream right behind a rock. Next, we would lift the rock and wait a few seconds. Then we would place the rock back down, pick up the net and see if we caught anything. In most of the bad areas of the river we would catch over 100 invasives and only about 15-20 natives. If we caught a native we would count it and then throw it back into the river. Once we were done fishing we took our catch back to the green house garage and counted them. They would then go in a zip lock bag and then into the freezer to be measured and inventoried later. We caught Crayfish about 2 times a week.

As you can see I learned a heck of a lot of information at Valley Forge.