Ivy removers work for food

Goats help school keep invasive plants at bay without chemicals

By ERIC BARTELS

Pamplin Media Group, Feb 12, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

Goats protect the grounds of Catlin Gabel School from invasive English ivy and Himalayan blackberry by chomping down on the plants. Grounds supervisor Mike Wilson says the goats are more effective, and more eco-friendly, than chemicals.

ERIC BARTELS / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

For two and a half years, Mike Wilson has been turning nature against itself, to good effect.

Wilson, grounds supervisor at Catlin Gabel School in Southwest Portland, wants to make sure the extensive forest on the school’s 54-acre campus remains healthy, thereby protecting the headwaters of creeks that feed the Tualatin River.

So when invasive plant species threatened, Wilson responded with measures more forceful than technology or powerful chemicals. He hit them with goats.

Goats vs. English ivy, which can climb and kill even mature trees?

“They’ve already made a massive dent,” Wilson says of his 13-member herd. “They’ve eaten it to about 5 feet high, maybe 6.”

Himalayan blackberry, thickets of which leave no room for low-growing native plants? Wilson says the goats cleared an overgrown hillside that swallowed a riding mower. “They decimated it,” he says.

The goats got the attention of the local media last summer when they were put to work by Providence St. Vincent Medical Center, which owns 10 acres of forest adjacent to Catlin Gabel. That project was considered a huge success.

“They’re a phenomenal tool,” Wilson says.

The herd, which actually is on loan from another employee at the private school, represents an increasingly popular, natural approach to battling invasive species and bad bugs.

The strategy, aimed in part at reducing the use of toxic herbicides and pest control agents, also is seen in the rising sales of live insects like ladybugs at nurseries and garden centers.

“People are afraid of chemicals,” says Mark Sytsma, chairman of the Oregon Invasive Species Council, which represents a number of state agencies and institutions.

Sytsma, a professor in the Environmental Science and Management Department at Portland State University, says there is a time and place for problem solvers like Wilson’s goats, as long as they are properly managed.

“In general, there’s increasing awareness of those sorts of approaches,” he says. “It’s appealing to use these kinds of controls, but they also can damage things.”

Nursery stocks good eggs

Portland Nursery’s Southeast Stark Street store still stocks powerful chemical herbicides.

“A lot of people just want to go and kill what’s bugging them,” says sales associate Chad Roberts, not intending to pun. “Some people want to get it done and over with. But they’re killing beneficial insects, too.”

Roberts has seen a trend toward more organic methods. Ladybugs, the cute red beetles that are death to aphids and spider mites, are not alone on the store shelves.

Live mason bees are sold in sealed cardboard cylinders that look like they might just as easily contain ready-to-bake pastries. The bees, which hibernate inside the containers, are prolific pollinators of flowering plants.

“We barely keep them in stock,” Roberts says.

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