A story from the Halfmoon Bay Environmental Society
In the 80s when I came up the Coast to visit my friend Kate in Roberts Creek, I remarked to her how pretty the yellow Scotch Broom was all along the 101 and the Creek downtown breakwater. She proceeded up one side of me and down the other, explaining in strong terms how Broom was taking over, crowding out native plants and aggravating folks’ hayfever. It was a pest that should be discouraged and in no way admired. I was properly told.
Kate died some years later and in her memory, when I moved up the Coast myself, I thought about organizing a Broom Busters group to combat the invasion in my Halfmoon Bay neighbourhood. Don Cunliffe, President of the HB Citizens’ Association at the time, gave me a positive response and became the second official HB Broom Buster. In May of 2011, the initial outing with 13 volunteers cleared 2 tonnes of Broom from along Redrooffs Road, taken away by the Parks Board in SCRD trucks. The next year we tackled Connor Park too, and Sue Lamb at the HB Elementary School involved her Grade One and Grade Three classes to help with the harvest. The adults wielded the sharp tools and the kids happily hauled Broom to the pick-up pile.
The next year the SCRD washed their hands of us and disposal of the Broom harvest became an issue and a headache. We improvised with a secret burn-pile at a neighbour’s sandpit. While a little local publicity brought out eager new volunteers each May, what to do with the cut Broom became an annual problem when the Sechelt Green Waste put a ban on Broom. Last year, our helpful HB Fire Chief created a burn-pile in his demo yard next to the Fire Hall and did a controlled burn in the rainy springtime. The solution to the disposal problem that the SCRD has dreamed up is to fill clear plastic bags with Broom from which all flowers and seeds have been removed. There are a couple of reasons why this is not workable: the process would require slave labour; the landfill doesn’t need more plastic. Solutions to problems should not create bigger problems than what you started out with. Powell River has a high-efficiency burner that they invested in but the SCRD imagination appears more limited.
The result of our 10 years of Broom Busting along Redrooffs and in Welcome Woods is apparent in our relative freedom from Scotch Broom; we live in one of the few areas where the native Arbutus and Sword ferns and Oregon Grape and tiny yellow Cowslips have been given a new lease on life. Season by season, the yield gets smaller, an encouraging sign that our efforts are paying off. Other groups of neighbours in other enclaves are forming their own bands of Busters so the idea is catching on. It may be hard to imagine a Sunshine Coast free of Scotch Broom but our experience in our own small neighbourhood shows that persistence does work.
Resources
- BroomBusters.org– BroomBusters is a non-profit society with a mission to educate and empower communities to contain the spread of Scotch Broom