Bittersweet Removal

Last Friday the students in our class worked on a service project on our UME campus.  Before we went

Lesson before we outside

outside we learned about how to identify the various vines that can be found on our campus so that we could differentiate between poison ivy and bittersweet.  We learned that bittersweet is a vine that has alternate patterned leaves and can hang loosely from a tree or twine very tightly to almost suffocate the tree.  Poison ivy has three leaves and grows in the opposite pattern of leaves and hugs the tree very tightly with tiny hairs holding on to the tree.  We also learned about native grape vine and Virginia Creeper which can both be found in our woods locally.

After the children learned how to identify the vines we went outside with our tools and got to work.  In less than an hour we successfully removed two huge buckets of bittersweet including one section that included berries.  The children learned that the berries are the most important thing to remove since that is were the all important seeds  are that spread the bittersweet.  We also learned how to remove it.  You have to cut it at the ground and also above your head and then keep checking on it in the future to make sure it does not grow back together.

We even had to unwind the bittersweet from around a few trees.  It was so tight on one tree that it is 

impeding the growth of the tree and actually cutting into the bark as the tree is growing.  The students were very excited about this project and asked if we could continue to work on this one
section that has a lot of bittersweet in it.  I think we will continue with this service project since it gives them good volunteer experience as well as empowering them to do good things for their school community.