You CAN Grow Apples Here

This year marked the second when we harvested apples from the four trees in our little orchard. The fruit was small, sometimes lightly speckled with cedar rust, after peeling more useful for cooking than eating fresh, but still. We have enjoyed half a bushel of apples for each of the last two years. Ours come in very early, in late June and July, in the midst of some of our hottest, most humid weather.

The conventional wisdom in Central VA involves it being too far east into the Piedmont for apple trees: bugs, humidity, and ever-warmer winters are not good for the fruit. All true, yet somehow three of our four trees have produced well. We found three things have helped. 

I've written here about pruning and also controlling Eastern Tent Caterpillars. Yet that's only half the battle. The most important change we made involved a timely application of an organic spray of copper sulfate. The product reminds of chemistry-set ingredients from my childhood, and it does need to be applied properly.  

Lately I've used Bomide's Captain Jack brand, simply because it's what I can find locally.  You don't want to drink the stuff or let it puddle where animals might sample it. After an early-morning application with a sprayer attached to a garden hose, I kept our dogs and chickens out of the orchard from all day. 

Organics are not without human-and-animal risks, yet copper sulfate proves far less harmful to you or wildlife than something like Captan. I did use it once, before we had animals near the trees. No longer.

You'll want to do some reading, but if you try to grow apples in a damp and warm climate, you will mostly likely need a fungicide applied once or twice after the tree stops blooming. 

We got enough fruit to experiment with spiced apple rings (wonderful) and our usual batch of canned apple sauce (also delicious).

It's apple season! Get picking!

Image courtesy of The Virginia Apple Board.

COVID-19 And Six Acres of Solitude

I want to begin by making one thing clear: I want this terrible pandemic over. I feel sorry for those whose lives and livelihoods have been hurting.  No snark forthcoming. It will be a blessing to us all to have a vaccine widely available.

This post will discuss, briefly, my enjoyment in solitary pursuits, and give some tips about field management from a decidedly novice point of view.

In the relative silence of these months, I realized that I do not miss the pre-pandemic world; even my desire to eat an artisanal meal at a locally owned restaurant has been blunted. Part of my feelings are old habits of solitude, as compared to the more social people I know. As I get older, other people seem to wear me out with their constant neediness and lack of resilience in the face of adversity.

My wife and I have been inordinately blessed to have farm work, and lots of it, to keep us occupied and outdoors during the pandemic. We built two structures, improved our raised beds in the garden, expanded the dog run and chicken run, laid in a winter's worth of firewood, and more. Next up, replacing an elderly tractor's wiring harness and working a young livestock dog into our pack of pups, to watch the perimeter.

One huge project, that I've only noted in passing because other projects leave me little time to post more here, involves cultivating six acres of ten across the road from us that belong to my wife's brother. It's a former farm field where dad, aka Big Ed, used to grow tobacco, then soybeans. It went to weeds and saplings years ago, getting only an occasional bush hogging. Over time any ground-nesting birds vanished because fescue (shame on you, Blogger, for not recognizing that word) crept in and it mats too thickly to permit nesting.

My wife's family wanted to hear whippoorwills again and attract coveys of quail. To that end, I've spend about 80 hours in the past two years running heavy machinery and smoking cigars from the tractor seat (okay, about 4 hours of smoking, I'd estimate). The rhythm of the work is really satisfying in a Marie-Kondo sort of way. 

Last year, a landscape biologist from our Extension Agency walked the property and gave us lots of advice, mostly good. I say "mostly" because even the "organic" method of controlling fescue would still involve several thousand dollars for spraying Roundup or similar around the perimeter. That is a DIY cost, mind you, which meant buying a tank and sprayer, too, in order to block fescue creeping in and to leave an ATV/tractor road at the edge. 

The non-organic method involves spraying the entire field. This would kill all the pollinators, including our honeybees.

"No. Hell no," was my response. "I want that crap banned." That's usually my reply to folks who advocate spraying. Granted, the little bottle of Roundup concentrate I apply with a paint brush to Tree of Paradise is still dangerous, but it's hardly the hundred gallons or so we would need to spray a perimeter.

If we want our ecosystem to endure, we need to get beyond our species' suicidal habit of automatically reaching for dangerous chemicals. Period. So our management plan involved mowing the perimeter very short, then plowing, discing, and sowing the ground with plants that suppress weeds and build up the soil.

During the course of the hours on and off the tractors, I learned about managing for wildlife. The first principle involves contacting your extension agent and getting advice. We got a full management plan, free of charge. 

Even if I don't agree with 10% of it, the other 90% is worth its weight in...wild birds. I also highly recommend, for those in my region at least, a PDF guide, Managing Land in the Piedmont of Virginia, authored by the American Bird Conservancy, Piedmont Environmental Council, and the Virginia Department of Game & Inland Fisheries. Check with your state agency to see what they may offer for your bioregion.

Beyond that:

• Think long-term: What are the goals for the property in 5, 10, 20 years? 100? I wished we thought more like that about all our land. But it's good to make a plan that can adapt to a drought, flood, or in these parts an actually cold winter. And farmers should make provisions for keeping the land in family hands and in production. That's another issue for another post.
  
• Know when and if to mow: We had to mow the fescue before tilling it under, to suppress what we did not want. Weeds were up to my shoulders and that meant mowing. Sadly, I had to do so at a time when fauns might be in the grass. I didn't see any, but I began from midfield and mowed outward, rather than starting from an edge; this let wildlife escape.
  
• Not everyone can burn a field: Controlled burns sound great! They mimic what happens in meadow ecosystems, naturally. But good luck finding a crew that wants to take on smaller fields. We were told that below 40 acres, you won't get many offers. So we chose the mow, till, plant method. And for the love of God, don't try a controlled burn if you've never done it. It's a job for pros.
  
• Don't make things worse by cultivating: Soil too wet? You will make a mud field and likely get the tractor stuck. I did that once in a low spot. Too dry? It's Grapes of Wrath time, with a mini Dustbowl of your own making on a windy day. I found that following my two-share plow with a disc harrow as soon as possible, then discing across the furrows really worked well. The second time I put down seed right after, and we had rain. The cover crop / green manure sprouted within a week.
  
• Plant right to improve the soil while attracting game: Ask the extension agent about a soil test if you are unsure. With our heavy clay soil, we opted for adding nitrogen and breaking up the clay. We planted about 700 pounds of seed in 2 plantings: buckwheat, Peredovik sunflower, and iron-clay peas (excellent in clay, as the name suggests) to suppress weeds, followed by a winter crop of rye.  This all gets disced in the next year as a green manure, before replanting. The next spring, I had a tough time finding the peas so I went with buckwheat and the sunflowers. For this winter, I just cut the field but let the weeds and seeds persist, as I see very little fescue. Next year, I'll disc and sow selectively (1 strip disced 6' wide, skip 12', disc again) to begin attracting birds that require some bare spots of soil to build nests. With foxes vanishing around here as coyotes arrive, we may get lucky soon.
  
• Be humble about it all: a neighbor looked out one day and saw a tractor mired, hub-deep, in a furrow. That's because I'd tried to hurry, discing when the ground was too wet. He's an experienced farmer and said nothing, though had the tractor stayed there long enough, I'm sure he'd have offered to pull it out. I should have done it right after plowing...or waited, but no. I learned something about weather and patience. Nature does not work on our schedule. Now I watch the weather, the frost forecast, and the advice of those who know more than I ever will.

By bringing tidiness to the field, what remains sparks joy, as Marie Kondo would say. It also, as practiced, builds habitat for the sorts of animals getting ever scarcer as old fields grow back to forest and active ones are managed with a relentless application of metal blades and poisons. There's personal as well as environmental mindfulness at play. You get you know your inner self when you spend that much time alone without a screen.

You don't need six acres, or 6000, to practice some of these ideas. Spend some time alone on your property without distractions. Then ask:

What would my yard/field/farm/woodland look like if I planted and managed it with the next 100 years in mind? Sounds subversive, doesn't it?

Good.

 

Apple-Tree Pruning

I am rather astounded that so far in Tractorpunk I have not said a word about apple trees. Perhaps it was humility; a few years and two classes later, I am only starting to understand the principles of managing a few trees.  My trees all looked like the mess shown above, at first.

The rewards of good pruning are immense; there are few locally grown foods with more lore, and more taste, than a good apple.  I began my quest to raise apples with a few varieties purchased from Albemarle Cider Works south of Charlottesville; we planted three trees in a fenced area near three very neglected older trees, intending to bring them all into production. Earlier we'd put two more in a very wild location, a seldom-visited meadow in Buckingham County, where I once saw a mama bear and her three cubs dining on the fruit from a pear tree. At least we'd feed the bears there.

Over the past few years I have attended two pruning workshops. I've learned that must be patient with apple trees, and some pruning must be done annually and carefully. In time apples can be harvested every year, even with the organic methods I currently use. I may eventually resort to one spraying of the fungicide Captan, after bloom and pollen-collection, each year. Otherwise I will just fertilize and maintain the trees.  Our climate in Central VA is changing, whatever some politicians ignorantly claim, in ways that may not permit apple-growing in a decade or so. In the mean time, I'll see what happens.

This time of year, the earliest part of Spring, is best for pruning. Much of what I learned about pruning can be found here, but here are a few other things I have discovered. 

1) Pruning really does help with blight. Our older trees were full of "Shepherd's Crooks" and blackened foliage, indicating Fire Blight. It's hard to eradicate with organic methods, but not impossible.

Last year I pruned all three trees heavily and cleaned up all the debris, then put it in the landfill in a plastic bag. I was told by an orchard manager that burning the trimmings can just make blight-spores go airborne again! Tools have to be clean, so I reach for rubbing alcohol and wipe the blades of pruners and pruning saw frequently, or I make a 1/9 solution of bleach and water and dip the tools frequently in a bucket.

2) Do not fertilize too much. Pruning makes one want to put down fruit-tree fertilizer, but that can be counterproductive. My reading indicates that fertilizing after heavy pruning will produce water-sprouts and lots of foliage growth; such young growth is susceptible to Fire Blight, one of the factors that led me to prune in the first place. Also lots of new leaves in the wrong places block sunlight and air from getting into the center of the tree, something essential for good health.

3) Could a little kid climb your tree? The answer should be "yes." I loved that bit of advice from our extension agent. Here the goal is to make a tree with an open center and not too many branches.

I aim to create a "vase shape" such as in this illustration from Stark Brothers.

While my trees did not get as severe a pruning as shown on the left, I did cut them hard again this  year.  This close-up shows how crossed and cluttered the branches were on a five-year-old tree we planted in Buckingham County and have only pruned one time before:

 

After pruning this tree, it's probably too long at the ends, but now the tree has room for air circulation and light. Next year I'll step back the main branches to keep them from getting too long; long thin branches often break under the weight of fruit.

4) Apple trees are tough. In the classes I took, the extension agents and apple growers stressed that many novices are terrified of pruning, yet trees can bounce back from poor cuts.

In my case, I am certain not all of my cuts are right, especially high in the trees where I cannot get a close look at the buds. There I use a pole pruner. Where it is safe to climb a pruned tree, I will step up to the first branching of major limbs and inspect, or lean a small ladder against a tree. Mostly I use my Felco #2 pruners or a set of bypass loppers, keeping them sharp always with a few passes from a Bergamo sharpening stone I found at One Scythe Revolution.

No Till? I Think Not.

I've been fascinated by small-scale successes with no-till gardening, such as lasagna gardening, but so far on our little farm, it is simply not working for commercial growing. I have 7000 square feet of raised beds now, and more on the way. In time, however, I will greatly reduce tillage. I cannot even fathom how my friend Dominic would manage 3 acres without tilling. He uses a cultivator on a row-crop tractor.

In my case, the tractor goes into the field once, when I first busted the sod. First I plowed, then harrowed. To get raised beds ready, I tilled, then amended the soil before planting and mulching. Since we use no herbicides, the weeds still creep in, particularly Cynodon dactylon, AKA wire grass, AKA Bermuda Grass and, yes, AKA Devil's Grass. It grows up and through the wire mesh we keep around our raised beds and colonizes new areas but growing roots from its runner through layering.

You cannot get rid of it without chemicals. On our patio, far from our food, I do spray Roundup on calm days. I've used it concentrated and carefully for years on stumps of Tree of Heaven.

In the garden, however, poison is out of the question. So I reach for the tiller whenever I replant a bed.

Wire grass can be reduced or even killed by shade, but that's no help in a sunny vegetable garden. Some plants form a dense canopy, such as sweet potatoes or our big crop of Thai Peppers, but the wire grass is still around, biding its time even under 6 inches of wheat straw mulch.

We own two tillers, a walk-behind with rear tines and forward and reverse gears. It's a beast. I use it for new beds or those badly overgrown by wire grass. For other beds during rotation, I use a handheld tiller to break the weeds' hold on the soil, then rake out with a for-tine cultivator or field rake. I then add amendments, usually four parts of our homemade compost, one part rock dust, one part fireplace ashes. That yields the holy trinity of gardening: Nitrogen, Rock Phosphate, Potassium.

I call this method "low till" and it does keep weeds manageable.  I try never to till too deeply.

But who wants to live on a golf course? No one that I'd want to drink with. Or have as a neighbor.

My method of low-till cultivation has kept weed pressure manageable, though I have to go around after rain and pull long runners of grass out of and around our beds.

Nature will win this battle in the long run. So be it. Wire grass is excellent in lawns and shakes off drought and even dog-urine attacks that leave brown circles in our field.

First Lessons in Commerce

Despite the happy looks on the farmhands' faces, it was a tough harvest at the start. With no pumpkins, we got no income from one customer.

Squash-bugs were a horror this year, and from 18 vines we harvested exactly 2 pumpkins. Only one went into the root shelter, while another one had a bad spot. I cut up the rest of it and froze it for our pumpkin soup or pies.

Lesson learned: to continue an organic regimen for squash and pumpkins in the garden, I'm going to have to start with insect netting over them and have diatomaceous earth down as soon as I put in seedlings.

Luckily, our little venture as an LLC has sold some cucumbers, lettuce, and now hot peppers. That said, even with these cash crops we'll not realize a profit this year. I must next year or will revert to "Hobby" status for IRS purposes. Thus I won't hire farmhands next year, my major expense, and do the picking myself.  My main helper does other work, anyway, on buildings here and helping to split wood, so he can be paid by me and not the LLC.

Next year will be interesting, however, as a new customer is about to open a produce stand just down the road. He's an Iranian with family who help him, and they'll sell produce from local farmers. He wants whatever we can provide.

It will be called "Garden of Eden," and I've high hopes for him and whatever I can contribute. The other lesson learned, then, is to have a couple of high-volume customers and diverse offerings. If the peppers had not come in so well, we'd hardly have any income for 2015.

Luckily, I still have a day job. For now.

Hay Making Experiment!

A few times each year, we mow a couple of fields of pasture grass, with very few weeds, in Buckingham Country. I would like to mow less often and keep the hay. On second cuttings, we could get straw, with fewer seeds and more potential as garden mulch. If we start keeping a few goats next  year, we'd want hay. What's the difference between hay and straw? Read all you would EVER want to know, right here.

The inputs into our food matter, and when we can we grow our own food or buy organic. For animals we feel the same way. I am confident that our grass here and in Buckingham is free of pesticide and herbicides, so the fields we mow can provide good fodder or animals or mulch for our rows of plants.

Sounds great until one prices out a baler and tedder. I don't own a sickle mower for the tractor but the other implements can set one back $20,000 new. Thus I'm not likely to go that route for might amount to 100 or so bales annually (not that we currently use more than 20). Luckily, not all of the world has turned to massively expensive techniques. This page from Ethopia, for small-scale herding operations, shows some techniques I plan to adopt.

While I think a hay tedder for the tractor may be a reasonable investment, so I can windrow the hay easily after cutting with the rotary mower on the tractor, a baler is big money. I'd rather pay a farm-hand a couple hundred dollars a year to help me hand-bale the hay. Stacking would we really fun, if the fields were near where I have gardens and animals. Scratch that: it's 50+ miles from field to farm-site.

My research on this turned up the Rev. J.D. Hooker's article about how to build a baler-box. It's very similar to the box shown on the Ethiopian page. It was a snap to make. I only needed a few screws and some 3/4 plywood. I added L brackets around each side since I'd be standing IN the box, stomping.

We cut and transported the grass to dry at home, but I'd prefer to windrow the hay and bale it at the site.  I  turned the hay once and checked for moisture. If it rots or gets moldy, it will go out for mulch or be spread in the chicken run.

My experiment produced three 2'x2'x18" bales out of 3/4 load of hay from the pickup's bed. With its 8' bed, the truck will hold 16 bales. I baled three in 15 minutes, so when I next mow a few acres, I think I'll take a farm-hand and get 50 or so bales done. We can stack and cover the ones we don't trasport with a tarp, though a farm wagon for moving our tractor will one day double for moving bales.

I've ordered a European-Style hay rake and will now hand-scythe some rye-grass right here at home to see how well it does. I will get a few more bales locally before practicing on the big field at Buckingham.

Small Farms And 2015

Having just set up Beepasture Farms LLC, I do want 2015 to be the year of small agriculture. I've now a personal stake in it, as we move toward retirement from academic work and toward a "sideline income" from producing food without inputs of pesticides, herbicides, or petrochemical-based fertilizers.

Today is a watershed moment, as California's Proposition 2 bans some of the worst practices involved in the intensive rearing of caged animals. Americans have long been distanced from their food, and animal-welfare issues are only the visible aspect for an industrialized method of producing what we eat. I am as concerned with the invisible and slow effects of GMO crops; we do not know the long-term effects of trace amounts of herbicides that build up in our bodies from eating mass-market food. I suspect that in my remaining years, we'll find out and the results will not be pretty.

Writer Bill McKibben has urged America to become a nation of small-scale food producers again. We began that way. With our LLC I'm the only member, and it shields a producer from liability against his personal property. Only the assets of the LLC could be seized in court. It gives a member the flexibility to write off expenses, as long as the firm shows a profit at least every third year. A hobby, on the other hand, can only cancel income with expenses. It cannot show a loss. But mine is no hobby; it's a future small business and part of a much larger future for how we produce and eat food.

An LLC also provides a method to license with the state; some Libertarian friends disliked my doing that (it's not any of their darned business how I conduct my affairs, which should be a Libertarian principle, but I try to be cordial on Facebook). My incentive is licensing with the State Corporation Commission is to establish the firm for the long term. If I pay a few taxes now, it makes it easier to scale up to a larger operation when I begin to lease or buy more land for production nearby.

For now our horizon is small: 400 pounds of hot peppers for one restaurant in 2015 and a small annual profit after the loss shown for starting up in 2014. We ordered seeds, bought a post-hole digger for the tractor, and had several other incidental expenses related to fencing. It's a very hopeful start to the new year.

Sustainable, Chemical-Free Christmas Trees?

Rural landowners face a big dilemma when deciding to earn money from the land. First, there is scale: one must have enough land in production to earn one more than a pittance. I hope, with some pasture nearby, to eventually raise Christmas trees without any herbicides or pesticides. My plan would be to employ Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practices, as we do in our garden, mow for weeds, and hand shear trees each year properly until we harvest them.

As I read up on these concepts, and talk to a few local vendors who might buy my trees in a decade, I look no further than our farm garden for some advice on how to manage some of this.

We loaned much of our garden this summer out for an ongoing experiment by a tenant gardener, Dominic, who runs delli Carpini Farm. Other than feeding bugs to our chickens and applying diatomaceous earth to some plants, Dom has not been invasive in his practices. He uses organic fertilizers for top dressing, hand weeds, works the soil with manure, limestone, and fireplace ash, and hand digs most of his beds. Only one bed, never broken before, got the plow and harrow treatment by me. We both dislike that, but my own belief is "plow or till once" to get the weeds gone, then work small plots by hand after. In our sauna of a climate, it is tough to do otherwise.

Right now, the experiment has also showed him and me that being sensitive to the market and finding a niche crop helps.  For next year, if the weather holds, he is thinking of more cantaloupes and fewer tomatoes. After all, in Central VA, everyone grows tomatoes. Local melons, while not exactly rare, are harder to find and his first sales showed that these easily sell out. I will add hot peppers to the mix. Very few growers here have certain varieties I know will sell out at the farmer's markets.

I am considering something similar for trees, but I will have to identify varieties popular around here and that grow well in our climate. I love Scot's Pine but Jean English's article from Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners shows how relentlessly the market determines things. Scots Pines, also a favorite of the author, did not sell because the needles are too prickly for most consumers. Then the question becomes, what trees thrive here and will survive enough shaping to give the iconic (and artificial) conical shape that modern consumers expect?

Our great-grandparents were happy with a "natural" tree, open branches and all. Perhaps in the future, in a new era of energy scarcity, we will be again. Yet I cannot grow that tree for a profit. So the research begins as I talk to local merchants and read more from those in the business.

Because if we have to spray poisons, the deal is just off.

Getting Really Local

Despite T.S. Eliot's declaration to the contrary, I do not find April to be the cruelest month. I really enjoy it, in fact. In the air are promises of summer ease, given my delightful academic schedule. We always have commencement on Mother's Day, but even before that, we have a week free when the soon-to-graduate go to "beach week" for a final communal debauch.

That sort of thing was never for me, even when I was a callow undergraduate. I tended to enjoy some casual-reading time and a bit of geeky gaming with friends, once classes ended.  And unlike so many hyper-parented students these days, back then I had no money.

Still, let them have some fun. Many of them will soon be back at home, looking for work,\ or slaving as disposable units for a large firm that will one day discard them. My students often--with a few really canny exceptions--find my attraction to the land strange. So do older creatures of chain stores and suburban neighborhoods. They cannot see the fragility and temporary nature of these living arrangements. When someone like James Howard Kunstler challenges them (as he did in a Skype visit to a class of mine a few weeks back) the students are either profoundly shocked or they laugh off Jim's dire predictions about the end of easy capital and easy energy.  After all, their smart phones, to which they are addicted, beckon them into an eternal now of continual progress and easy connections.

I'm not so sure about some of Jim's ideas, but I also doubt that our current exploitative way of life can continue, unabated, for much longer. My own solution may not suit everyone, but it involves living a deeply local life. Jim advocates it, especially in how one uses localism to build community. What does that mean?

I began by taking an assessment of what we purchase. How much of it could be sourced from a locally owned firm? How much extra would it cost, if it did cost extra? Second, I began to try, as best I could, to establish a relationship with merchants, contractors who do quality work, and old-school mechanics, not dealerships. This is not as hard as one might think. Our local butcher shop provides premium, but reasonable, meats and seafood from local sources; the beef, pork, and chicken come from our very county.  While meat may again become a luxury item at some future point, for now sustainably raised livestock help local growers retain the land, make money, and pass on essential skills to another generation. Agribusiness does none of this.

Likewise, the mechanics' shop to the east down the road and the tractor-repair to our west employ local people and have owners who live nearby. These folks will work on older cars and farm equipment that the big shops won't touch. Two small-engine wizards get things to work I can't, and I am not bad at it though chain saws will be forever finicky, even with ethanol-free gas in the tank!

Thinking local made us look for plants the same way. We were recently at Herbs Galore, an annual sale by Maymont in Richmond. It's a ritual to go and pull around a wagon of organically raised plants from local growers. Given the use of pesticides and herbicides in the soil of plants from big-box stores, we stopped buying their plants. The chemicals may be killing our bees, as seems to be the case for Neonicotinoids already under a two-year moratorium in the EU.  I will need a lot more evidence before I put chemicals into our land again, beyond the same small bottle of Roundup that has been doing a great job of controlling "Tree of Heaven" on our property. I'm so careful I use a small paintbrush to apply the product!

Perhaps it is the hope that blooms every April, but I'm not ready to give into the resignation of Jim Kunstler or worse, the despair of climate activist Paul Kingsnorth. Humans have a way of muddling along, even though we muddle things up in the process. At Herbs Galore, I saw, however, more than seedlings. I saw a new culture, a new-old type of capitalism, waiting to be born. It's at every locally owned brewery, never new bakery, every little business that finds a niche that Target or Amazon cannot crush.

Get to know your local merchants and cultivate some local skills. Even if doomsayers are wrong, any future with strong communities of committed neighbors will be a resilient one.

Tree of "Heaven"

I'm not a native-species purist. I love my Japanese maples and, for that matter, the basil in our garden. But some intruders are simply intolerable. Chief among them these days is "Tree of Heaven," or Ailanthus altissima. 

While a mature example is a pretty tree, it has many vices. For instance, Ailanthus tends to make the soil around it toxic to other plant life. Such a tree evolved carefully over the eons to compete with other plants. The Wikipedia entry cited notes the tree's many useful properties, but like mint in the herb garden, a little of this tree goes a long way.

And you can't just have a little of Ailanthus. Here is my "after" picture of the little colony shown above.

Left to its own devices, a mature tree can produce up to 325,000 seeds in a single season. The National Park Service's page on the tree has many shocking facts. But around here, I've got a couple of groves of the tree where soil was disturbed over the decades.

Control of this plant is not simple. Cutting simply leads to multiplication, like the Hydra of Greek mythology. Spraying is not efficient for huge groves, and I don't use chemicals in that manner.

Yet here my organic practice bends; we have an invasive species out of control. My technique, gleaned from several sources, involves cutting smaller trees to a height where I can treat the stump with Roundup concentrate, using a paint brush and great care to not get chemicals anywhere else.

This needs doing in late summer/early fall or in the spring. A few large trees will get a half-cut to the trunk that runs 2" deep, so I can treat the trunk with Roundup.  I plan to check my cuttings for sprouts in Spring and re-treat them. I have to wade into some really "snakey" thickets to get to some of the trees, so snake-proof chaps are mandatory gear.

We'll see if we have fewer next year. Luckily, there are not huge groves here, as one sees along I-64. I'm probably dealing with 100 trees...for now.