MANAGEMENT


RHODO


he says that it’s critical to establish a plan with your neighbours because you’re wasting your time if nothing is being done on their land as there’ll be regeneration from seeds. He also urges caution when it comes to fires to remove the waste, discouraging woodland owners from starting lots of fire sites through a woodland. You have to get a rhododendron fire burning very hot, and that can damage the soil and biodiversity.


Contractors and grants The alternative, if rhododendron is a significant problem in your woodland, is to call in the contractors, harvesting timber or applying for grants to pay for the extraction. John Stafford, who is an FC woodland officer, recommends getting three quotes, using the FC day rates as a guide. He suggests spraying in humid weather for the best results, making sure you spray underneath the leaves where there are the most stigmata. “Spraying’s best when it’s slightly breezy and more than 15°C,” he says. Start first with the mature flowering plants, and then really attack it, don’t just pick at it. He favours excavation, cutting up the stems for firewood, for which rhodo is excellent. Using a contractor is costly, but as


woodland officer Andrew Dall’Oglio from the Forestry Commission explained at the Ashdown Forest Centre, there are grants available. You’ll find the FC Standard Costs under Operations Note 9 on the FC website. With a Woodland Improvement Grant (WIG) you can claim 50% of the costs or 80% in priority cases. With a Woodland Management Grant (WMG, which requires you’ve made a management plan) you can claim 70% of the cost. The Forestry Commission in England grades the likely costs according to the work being done (talk to your local FC woodland officer in Wales and Scotland for grant details). If most of the material


Further reading


The FC produces a publication entitled Managing and controlling invasive rhododendron, which can be downloaded for free from the FC website (forestry.gov.uk/ publications). Other sources of information are: www.forestresearch.gov.uk/ rhododendroncontrol www.t-c-m-rd.co.uk/invasive- weeds/rhododendron_ponticum www.conservationevidence.com/ attachments/pdf129.pdf


INVASIVE SP ECI ES MANAGEMENT


Follow-up spraying with herbicide is essential after any mechanical treatment of rhododendron


is less than 7cm diameter (V15) they’d expect the costs to be about £500/ha, and with a WIG will pay 50% of that. When most of the material is greater than 7cm diameter (V16), they expect to pay £2200/ha. Category V18 (£3800/ha) is for difficult, dense sites, where the rhodo is large and access is poor and perhaps there’s been windthrow to compicate extaction. The most FC expect to pay is £5000/ ha (V18a) when the site is steep and very inaccessible. They expect follow- up spraying two summers after extraction (V17) to cost £400/ha.


Applying for grants If you are looking to apply for a grant you are advised to estimate the percentage cover in your woodland and map any large clumps. You can then complete a WIG calculator online. The good thing is that once the rhododendron has gone woodlands will regenerate naturally quite fast, though Patrick McKernan believes you may need to replant if you want trees for timber. ‘Woodlands are pretty robust,” he says, “and I haven’t seen woodlands affected by rhododendron when it comes to replanting.” John Stafford agrees that once the rhodo goes the toxins go too, but you do have to make sure you’ve beaten it first. An example of both the


challenges and potential benefits of rhododendron control can be seen at


10 Smallwoods Spring 2010


Duke of


Edinburgh participant and FC ranger (above) clearing invasive rhodo from Callender Wood, Scotland. Mulching


(right) is quick but leaves toxic debris on the ground


Using a


billhook to cut stems before injecting them with herbicide at the Forestry Commission's Northern Research Station in Midlothian


Chainsawing


is very effective, but labour intensive and slow, especially in inaccessible sites


Broadstone Warren, just behind the Ashdown Forest Centre where the rhodo day was held. This is a 400 acre site, owned by the Scouts, and used by them for camping and events. The rhododendron cover has significantly limited the Scouts' activities, but now that the rhododendron is being cleared they can take more visitors. Ashdown Forest is an SSSI which had 20ha of invasive rhododendron in 2004 when operations began. According to Superindendent Hugh Prendergast, you can imagine this


www.smallwoods.org.uk


as a 2km strip, 100m wide. The aim is to clear the area of rhododendron by 2012, funding the operations with a £32,523 grant from the Forestry Commission, and mechanical harvesting of the timber through UPM-Tilhill. You have to be able to harvest at least 500 tonnes of timber from your woodland to cover the costs of extraction by machine. They’ve used an excavator to pull out the rhodo which costs about £270 per day. There’s low pressure on the site, and with a good operator


www.smallwoods.org.uk


there’s very little need for a chainsaw. Having pulled out a root system with a grapple, the operator will gently shake the root to loosen the soil. “With a grab we’ve done a huge amount of work in a very short time,” says Hugh Prendergast. Some people will say that this has the benefit of breaking up the seed bank and encourating natural regeneration of ground flora. They stockpile the waste, spraying any sprouts, and the Scouts burn rhodo on their campfires as a good alternative to deadwood.


Chipping or mulching Chipping the waste is also an option, but you need a large-mouth chipper and all the chips must be removed and there’s a high leaf content in the chips. There is also the option of attacking the rhododendron with mulching machines, which grind the plants up into a deep mat on the


forest floor, but this is hard to do around standing trees. Hand cutting in Ashdown


Forest has proved to be expensive and labour intensive, and they’ve relied a lot on volunteers. Some of these are regulars, coming two days a week on the Community Pay-Back scheme, while there have also been corporate sessions, like the Royal Bank of Scotland AwayDay, when RBS employees came to to spend a day clearing rhodo and having fun. “It gets volunteers involved, and they can achieve a lot of work,” explains Hugh Prendergast. For regular volunteers it’s a good idea to allocate a particular area that no one else will touch, so they can watch the wall of rhodo being pushed back slowly. As a result the Forest can breathe again.


Spring 2010 Smallwoods 11


photo: fc photo library


photo: fc photo library


photo: fc photo library


photo: fc photo library


photo: fc photo library


photo: fc photo library


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