City Point Volunteers Conquer Beach ​“Invaders”

Thank you to the volunteers from the Oyster Point Greenspace group and Urban Resources Initiative for cleaning up invasive plants, trash and clearing the trails and access to the water.
Our waterfronts and watershed lands and water need to be protected and accessible to everyone. New Haven has an incredible resource in its harbor on Long Island Sound and it’s rivers and streams and parks and undeveloped lands. We need to protect them and stop treating them like toilets and trash cans and start enjoying them and using them for education, activities, and taking care of them for ecological and environmental purposes.

I know mugwort is everywhere but did not know it was invasive. Names and pics of other invasives would be very helpful as I do my own weeding. Thanks!

Here is a good list of invasive plants in Connecticut including photos.
https://cipwg.uconn.edu/invasive_plant_list/#

All for removing invasives and composting; however, invasives should not be composted as it is too difficult to actually kill them by composting and they can end up being spread further instead. Invasive weeds are extremely persistent and able to survive conditions that would kill regular weeds.

Heather, it is recommended to spread invasives out to dry in the sun after shaking all dirt off roots. Once they are solarized for about 2 weeks, all dry and crispy, they can be disposed of.

"Beach roses" or Rosa rugosa, though beautiful, are also invasive, so the rose in the photo captioned "rose from a planting a few years back" should not have been planted, unless it's in a very well-tended location where it can be kept within bounds.

Another way to render invasive weeds safe for composting is to stuff them into black plastic trash bags. If left in the sun, the bags will heat up and the plants will cook. Then the plant matter can dumped out and composted, and the bags saved and reused.

This may be safer than laying them out uncovered to dry in the sun, especially if there are seeds mixed in with the pulled weeds, which could blow away or be spread by birds, or survive drying out only to sprout later on. This is also why ideally, compost should be managed (balanced, turned, etc.) and kept damp, to speed decomposition, cause seeds to sprout while still in the compost (instead of later when it's put back in the garden), and to heat up the whole pile to the point where it will kill the seeds whether sprouted or not.

With backyard compost, however, you can be more casual. Your own backyard compost, with your own backyard weeds in it, which will rot down and then be dug in to your own garden beds, will inevitably contain some weed parts and weed seeds. But in those garden beds, you'll be regularly weeding. Over the years, the proportion of viable weed elements (seeds or roots or whatever) will diminish.

Still, I throw my really awful weeds (mugwort, mostly) not into my compost bins but into a brush pile in the darkest, dankest back corner of the yard, along with the discarded Christmas tree, pruned branches, and other big stuff that would encumber the compost pile. The weeds thrown on there do not grow back. Neither do they turn into nice crumbly compost; the whole pile rots down very slowly into a stringy brushy mess. But that's OK because I have no intention of digging any of it back into my garden.