Within the next year, I hope to be moving from Louisiana to Oklahoma, to our family ranch. Due to logistics I currently container garden, but once I move I want to switch to permaculture - raised beds, food forest guilds, composting, eventually a hugelkultur. I’ll have a lot of room around my house to experiment! But I don’t want to have a negative impact on the rest of the ranch - the grazing land, other inhabitants’ gardens, and the native organisms and ecosystem already in place in the “wild” areas.
Most of my plants will go to friends but there’s some I’ll want to bring for sentimental reasons, like the amaryllis whose bulbs have been passed down through my husband’s family. There’s others that I could bring like the one sage plant that won’t die no matter how I neglect it, or the one particular basil that has a really great flavor. I don’t HAVE to have them but if it can be done safely I’d like to.
How concerned should I be about possibly bringing “aliens” along? I’m thinking about things like:
- septoria and downy mildew - I wouldn’t bring a symptomatic plant but is a plant that grew near an infected plant going to be a vector?
- hammerhead worms - I sometimes find these nasty little invasives hanging out under my containers waiting to eat my earthworms
- seed bank in the container soil — non-natives that seed profusely like celosia or wood sorrel. Things I let volunteer as a live mulch because I like to eat them, but don’t want to discover in five years I’ve accidentally let them take over the ranch
(I recognize that there is ongoing debate in these forums over whether “non-natives” are actually a problem. My concern is that in my ignorance I may bring something that will outcompete and crowd out existing plant species, but be of less value to the livestock and native wildlife than what was already there. I want to learn and enhance the current ecosystem, not disrupt it.)
- plants and invertebrates like earthworms that “should” be ok to bring because their species is native to OK, but won’t be the regional ecotypes and might bring various cooties that they are adjusted to but the OK ecosystem isn’t
My two big questions are:
1) how strict should I be along the spectrum of “bring the treasured heirlooms only” to “rent a U-Haul so ALL the plants will fit”?
2) what actions can I take before and after the move to mitigate any negative impacts?
Thanks so much!
Julie
