North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Kieran &/or Donna" <holycow@frontiernet.net>]

After seeing parts of Virginia that were practically a pure culture of 
Autumn olive, I have tried to prevent ours from ever fruiting again.  I dig 
out little ones here and there, and when we got a couple of small goats to 
eat brush, I thought they'd help.  As it turns out, they don't like autumn 
olive, and I suppose neither do the deer that must live in all those VA 
thickets of the stuff.  My son out in WA state told me about someone who is 
paid to run goats on govt and railway land to eat English ivy.  He said it 
was terribly expensive to have people try to remove it, and both cheap and 
effective to have the goats do it.   He said that the person doing this in 
his area run a lot of goats in a small area with electric fencing, and that 
when they were done it would be 5 years before the ivy got to be a problem 
again.  Maybe we have here some kind of Nafexers oddball way to make some 
money, because I can tell you that goats love blackberry plants (for the 
West coast) and roses (multiflora in the east).  Someone in another TN 
county showed me a 20-30 ft wide multiflora hedge dating back to the 1950's. 
It takes awhile to really do them in, as you'd have to come through and mow 
back the branches to let them into another section of the thicket.  I've 
been dealing with honeysuckle here, and the goats are really helping a lot. 
Donna