Plants are essential for life on earth, they provide food, produce oxygen, and are very very pretty! Unfortunately some plants become a problem when they are taken out of their natural habitat and inserted in another. Invasive plants can become a problem when trying to have a healthy environment for native plants as they create a competition for nutrients, water, and space. Although there are many different species of plants that are invasive there are some that are more common than others, for example: Birds Foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and Sweet Clover (Melilotus officinalis) are pretty commonly found in common gardens and prairie remnants. Although Sweet Clover is very common, getting rid of it is fairly easy, you just have to wait for a rainy day and then, once the rain stops, the soil will be wet enough to just pull the plants out of the soil! The same cannot be said about Birds Foot Trefoil though, its extraction does share the same need of rain but the extraction requires the use of soil knives and very often while trying to take out the plant it will break leaving the taproot still intact.
Although there are existing methods to get rid of invasive plants, most of them are inefficient and require specific weather conditions. I decided to make a direct comparison between two methods of getting rid of Bird’s Foot Trefoil: Extraction, and herbicide. I randomly chose 20 plants of Bird’s Foot Trefoil around Tower Road and randomly selected 10 of them to be pulled out and ten of them to be treated with Green Shoots’ Blue Foaming Agent, Glyphosate 41%, and water.
While extracting Bird’s Foot Trefoil I started a stopwatch to record how long it took me to extract every plant. I divided the plants into two groups: medium plants and small plants as the difference is quite noticeable. The average time to extract medium plants was a minute and a half, while the average time to extract small plants was a minute. The amount of time is quite minimal but after applying the herbicide in the other 10 plants the difference is more noticas it took me an average of 20 seconds to apply in each plant no matter the size. Unfortunately the bigger plants were extracted some weeks ago by our team and I was not able to include it in this trial.
Using herbicide was more efficient as it took less time, it was fairly easy to use, and it can be used at any day and time as long as it’s not rainy.
Here are some pictures of the application of herbicide, the herbicide is quite hard to see but you can zoom in!
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