Vanquish the Vines and Leave the Leaves
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Halloween may be over but there are still scary monsters lurking in many of our yards, reaching out their tentacles to smother any unsuspecting tree or plant within reach. These bad guys are the invasive vines encircling our valuable trees and covering our shrubs throughout Westchester. Some of the very worst are porcelain berry (photo on the right), English ivy, oriental bittersweet, Chinese wisteria and others. Left unchecked they will smother and kill mature trees, destroying the very base of our native ecosystems and diminishing your property values. The first place to start battling these invaders is at home, in your own yard and there is no better time than now, late fall and winter. 

So what’s the battle plan? Step one is to survey your yard and identify any trees with vines climbing on them. Some may have benign native vines such as Virginia creeper or poison ivy (don’t touch) but most will probably be invasives that you want to remove. When in doubt use a plant app to identify. The basic technique is to cut the vine as close to the ground as possible near the origin of the stems. Cut and pull smaller vines that are starting. If possible dig out some of the vine’s roots, mow around the base of the tree to keep it clear, checking periodically for vine regrowth. Vines hanging on the tree will dry and die so there is no need to pull them down, that can actually bring down branches in the process. Here is a detailed guide with photos listing local invasives and removal techniques, scroll through to locate various vines, our top priority. Ardsley Invasive Plants Guide.pdf Get your landscaper on board to help.

So this season as fall cleanup gets in full swing, let's focus on the real villains in our yards and stop trying to remove the good guys, every fallen leaf on our property. It turns out we’ve been putting our energy into the wrong place for years. Fallen leaves sustain a universe of wildlife, providing food and habitat for birds, pollinators, small mammals and amphibians. Without a layer of whole leaves these animals cant survive winter. Here is a wonderful Wild Kingdom article on fallen leaves and the hidden world that they support. 

Did you know that leaves are the most important bio resource produced in our yards? Before the advent of commercial fertilizer trees lived on what existed in the soil plus nutrients derived from decomposing leaf litter. Leaves enrich soil as natural mulch, leave them in your garden beds, under shrubs and trees and on hillsides, this benefits your soil and wildlife. 

Stop composting your squash seeds - eat them instead!

If you enjoy roasted pumpkin seeds, try roasting squash seeds the next time you roast or cook with squash. All squash seeds are edible, and they all taste great roasted with a little olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt. They taste great on their own, or you can add them to a salad for a nice crunch. They are good for you, too! 

1. Heat oven to 325
2. Scoop seeds out (option to rinse and pat dry, but not necessary) 
3. Toss seeds in a little olive oil and sprinkle with salt 
4. Spread seeds on a baking sheet and bake for about 15 minutes or until crispy, stilling them halfway through 

Wondering what to do with leftover Halloween pumpkins? Don't throw them in the trash. Take them down to the Peabody Preserve Outdoor Classroom in Sleepy Hollow on Saturday, November 11th at noon to smash 'em and leave 'em for compost.

Did you know that we pay for trash disposal by weight? And trash in Westchester gets incinerated? Heavy, wet and rotting pumpkins are much better off getting turned into garden gold (compost), but to ensure they break down well, it helps to smash them first. If you prefer to put them in the food scrap recycling bins in Lot C near Losee Park, it helps to break them into pieces first.

Become a Waste Warrior

Why not volunteer as a Waste Warrior on Saturday mornings at the TASH Market in Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow? It’s fun to be part of the market bustle and it’s fun to show others how they can reduce their footprint. Volunteers stand by the trash receptacles and explain the various options. If you have a little time, why not join this valuable group of individuals and make a tangible difference in our community? Contact TEAC for more information and to sign-up, at tarrytownenviro@gmail.com.

The Two Car Solution: Our Family’s Experience with Electric Vehicles
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By Catherine Ruhland, TEAC

Many US families, like ours, own two cars, to maximize their mobility (at least for the adults). But how should two-car families approach the question of whether to purchase a standard gasoline car with an internal combustion engine (an ICE), a plug-in hybrid (a PHEV) or a fully-electric vehicle (an EV)?  I’ll describe our own experience with solar panels, a PHEV and an EV.

Nine years ago my husband and I installed a 7 kW grid-connected solar panel array on the roof of our Tarrytown home. Its output more or less covered our yearly electric usage on a net basis—at least setting aside those summer months when one of our kids might have been a bit profligate with the air conditioning!  We calculate that we “earned back” the cost of installing the solar system after 6½ years, so that now our electricity is “free.”  Moreover, now that we are empty-nesters, we find the solar panels are actually able to cover, in full, the electric demands of our new ground- and air-sourced heat pump systems, our electric stove, and also our model-year 2018 PHEV. My daily routines involve trips of about 12 miles, while the battery of the PHEV will power the car 24 miles without use of the gas engine. As soon as I come home from the first trip, I plug it in again, and if I need to go out a second time, I generally have enough battery power available to also cover that trip. I fully recharge the PHEV each night.  Thanks to the solar panels, there’s no pollution, no carbon emissions.  (Keep in mind that model-year 2023 PHEV batteries often get 40 miles or more to a charge.)

We recently invested in a country place in upstate NY about 150 miles from Tarrytown. The PHEV is more economical for such long distances than an ICE, but the PHEV still uses gasoline and emits polluting exhaust after the first 24 miles. So we recently purchased an EV for that longer trip upstate. The EV can manage about 200 highway miles on one full charge when you also run either the heat or the air conditioning. We charge the EV both at our Tarrytown house, for which our rooftop solar supplies the power on a net basis, and at the upstate house, where our electricity is also 100% solar on a net basis because we enrolled with a community solar provider there.  Of course, we have to pay for the community solar, but residential electric rates are significantly lower upstate than here.  After factoring in the 10% rate rebate for community solar, we pay about $0.17 per kWh upstate, compared with ConEd’s roughly $0.26 per kWh downstate. [Ed note: Con Ed power costs more than that, see the next article...]

Here are the economics of driving, say, 30 miles in an EV SUV like ours that you charge at home in Tarrytown, compared with an equivalent ICE SUV: The average ICE SUV in the US gets 29 mpg, but for the sake of simplicity let’s say it’s 30 mpg. To drive it 30 miles therefore requires a gallon of gasoline, which today costs about $3.80.  Compare that with our EV SUV, which was getting about 3.5 miles per kWh in late summer to early fall this year with frequent highway use and moderate air conditioning.  To travel 30 miles therefore requires 8.6 kWh. My family’s electricity is free in Tarrytown because of our rooftop solar array, but otherwise Tarrytowners pay about $0.26 per kWh for electricity.  To travel 30 miles in our EV would therefore cost you $2.24—a 41% cost savings.

What about vacations, we recently asked ourselves. We were thinking of taking on the (kind of fun) challenge driving our EV from one charging station to the next on a long cross-country adventure. We were a little nervous about that, and in the end our “range anxiety” caused us to nix the idea.  We did travel, but we flew to our destination and rented an ICE there. Nonetheless, while traveling, we saw that almost everywhere we went there were sufficient charging stations within reasonable distances of each other—even in our destination state of Colorado . We belatedly realized that we in fact could have toured the country in our EV--conveniently even.

Electric vehicles may actually make sense for you when you consider your entire driving picture, including your commuting habits, your weekend excursions and your vacations. And by having a PHEV, you can embark on low-carbon emission trips without “range anxiety”!

What is a Deer Exclosure?
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By Catherine Ruhland, TEAC

Are you a plant lover? A lover of trees and bushes and anything green? Are you aware that we in Westchester County are living in the “Green Lie”? Did you realize that the plants, bushes and many of the trees that you are hiking around in our Westchester “green” spaces are from other continents, distant countries?

Is this a problem? Yes. The reason is that any given eco-system is composed, not only of plants, but also of animals, birds, reptiles and insects. These creatures are dependent on very specific plants for their very particular nutrients, and they rely on the continued existence of these nutrients. Once “their” plants disappear, they must search for replacement nutrients which may result in their moving away from this area--or even to the extinction of their species.

The degradation of the plant environment has occurred primarily as a result of the internationalization of commerce and the importation of non-native plants over decades, even centuries, for ornamental reasons. Commerce has brought non-native plant seeds attached to pallets, attached to boxes, and in ship balast. Ornamental plants have escaped into the wild and taken over entire eco-systems. Over the last 60 plus years, however, the inadequate control over the population of the White-Tailed Deer in New York State has tipped eco-systems in urban and suburban areas (and increasingly in rural ones also) into the disastrous range. This has happened as a result of the decline of their predators and the overall reduction in hunting in New York State.

In many areas deer have successfully browsed to extinction their favorite plants. After consuming almost every last one of their preferred foods in Westchester, deer now turn to a large number of other non-native plants, devouring some that they previously would never have touched. In the process they have eliminated many of the plants and seedlings that all the other creatures have depended on.

So how can one contribute to the reversal of this devastation? One solution is to build a deer exclosure. This is an area where the deer cannot enter to inflict their damage. A deer exclosure can be simply made with steel poles and thick seven foot high black plastic mesh, or with more expensive fencing of any other kind, such as wood. An easy system that has been tested uses black plastic mesh hanging down from steel cable attached to trees.

Some communities are looking for volunteers to help replant and reforest public spaces. Within some municipalities in our area, volunteers have helped to create deer exclosures in sections of public open-space or forest. Tarrytown is beginning to look into this, too.

As a land-owner, you may have a spot on you property that could be addressed. Once a deer-free space has been established, the process of restoration can begin. You can accelerate the process by removing invasive bushes and plants and replacing them with native species. Small non-native trees can be replaced with native trees. Of course, within the Village of Tarrytown, the removal of any tree, native or non-native, with a diameter greater than 4 inches at 4 feet 6 inches measured from the ground requires a permit.

A very popular method of reforesting small areas of degraded land is the Miyawaki Method. We will write more about this system at a later date.

For more information on the simple exclosure mentioned above, please follow this link.