Monona Woodland Park Success over Garlic Mustard

Over the past several years, the city of Monona has expended funds to plan and implement the restoration of Woodland Park to an oak savanna and oak woodland. Woodland Park Plan The first job has been to attack the invasives, especially garlic mustard. The city hired a contractor to spray while volunteers executed a prescribed burn and other volunteers did hand-pulling. Volunteers have been working on the invasives for the past 10 years or so.

I went over to the park today to check out the garlic mustard and plan this year's garlic mustard pull. Well, we will not be doing an organized effort this year, because there is simply very little garlic mustard anywhere in the park. I pulled about one lawn bag full and you could probably pull another one or two out of there if you were diligent, but that's about it unless I missed something. This is really an amazing success story. The picture shows what the park looked like circa 2006 - almost solid garlic mustard along both sides of the trail.

Of course, you can never really eliminate garlic mustard, but we can try controlling it with burns and hand-pulling I think. I am well aware that it can come back quickly and vigilant monitoring is still needed.

Invasive Species - Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) - WDNR

The city crew has also cleared the second Indian mound at Woodland Park (they did the other mound a couple years ago). It looks good. Now that it's cleared off, you can see some runoff damage in one spot that has been done over the years (decades? centuries?. Don't know what you can do about that.