The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Man fights invasive species organically
Invasives beware. Listen up all you non-native botanical bullies who have been pushing out our regional flora: You are on notice.
Michael Nadeau has come to the region and Litchfield County will be cleaning up its act. Or else. Twiggy thugs, botanical bad actors, and photosynthesizing bio-terrorists: Nadeau wants you gone. But don’t think for a blink that he’s going to enlist chemical warfare to root out the opposition. Nadeau fights back with organic weapons. And he wins.
When Michael Nadeau moved up to Sharon from Fairfield County, he saw a niche that desperately needed filling.
First of all, he was delighted to find a region filled with homeowners who care deeply about their land and are willing to play their part in the bigger picture.
The folks in our neck of the woods see beyond the yawning, perfectly manicured huge sweeps of greensward stewed in chemical herbicides that dominate the rest of the country. Around here, we seek solutions that will keep the earth green for future generations.
But we have the same issues that plague people everywhere. We have all the knotweed, phragmites, bittersweet, and barberry that push their weight around the rest of Connecticut. Answers were needed—sooner rather than later. Michael Nadeau created Wholistic Land Care Consulting, LLC to come to the rescue.
Got invasives and want them gone? Wholistic Land Care Consulting has an arsenal of organic methods that work. Or maybe you have a lawn and hanker instead for something that doesn’t eat up your weekends while taking a major bite out of your budget. In fact, you might like to see a beautiful alternative where those bad guys and boring blades of grass once dwelled. Well, Michael Nadeau does landscape restoration.
Where that boring lawn once spread, he can create a meadow. Or he can develop a plan for installing berries and other food-producing crops in spaces once marred by a craggy forest. And he can do it with pizzazz. This guy is cutting edge. He has his finger on the pulse of precisely what’s happening in the organic movement right now.
Michael Nadeau wasn’t always organic. At one time, he was on the other side of the fence. Way back when he first started in the industry, he was as jaded by chemicals as everyone else.
“I used to kill all the bugs,” he recalls of his former self. “But I knew I was doing something wrong. It took a while, but I did a wholesale transformation.”
Eventually, Michael Nadeau segued into Plantscapes Organics Inc and became one of the main players in the organic land care arm of NOFA (Northeast Organic Farmers Association).
He was doing rain gardens (aka bio-filtration gardens) before anybody else was hyperventilating over storm H2O runoff. Indeed, he was working with native landscaping while most other designers were still wedded to burning bushes.
When assessing the soil biology of a potential planting site for good fungi was still in its dark ages, Nadeau was part of the underground movement. After many years, he sold that business to his brother, and moved up to our little kingdom to do consulting.
What this means for Litchfield County is seismic. Michael Nadeau is helping gardeners to clean up their act.
“You’ve got to outsmart invasives,” he’s learned. “It’s about finding each plant’s Achilles heel — and every plant has one.”
So he might suggest inflicting sustained flooding plus a generous dose of salt to a stubborn stand of phragmites. Or he might urge clients to hire an air spade to displace roots. Rather than the constant chop down/regrow cycle that defeats anyone battling Japanese knotweed, he will send them on a mowing/organic herbicide injection/ mulching binge that gets to the root (literally) of the problem.
The breakneck banks of your babbling brook can be stabilized with a riparian border of comely plants that hold the soil firm rather than resigning the space to a tangle of invasives.
If you’ve tried sprinkling seed from a “meadow in a can” with limited success, Nadeau has a method of taking out chunks of sod and plugging in guilds of handsome meadow plants that really works. None of this happens overnight. But with proper practices and a savvy understanding of the personalities of plants, it can be done—and nature’s complex web will thank you for it.
“It’s about sustainability,” says Nadeau, “it’s for people who want hummingbirds and butterflies, not miles of boxwood.”
Meanwhile, Nadeau is practicing what he preaches on his own recently purchased 56-acre Sharon property where he gardens with partner Robin Zitter, who is an esteemed garden designer in the region.
Zitter was responsible for the original renovation of the Bellamy-Ferriday Gardens, “So she will always have her old roses and clematis,” Nadeau concedes.
At Meristem, which is what they call their property “because it’s a growing point,” they are cultivating two acres of land using permaculture techniques.
They established a freeform “food field” by working around the contours of the land rather than planting in rows, and they protect their corn field by surrounding it in blackberries with the theory that raccoons and turkeys will avoid ripping through the brambles to plunder the cornstalks.
They are planting an orchard of medlars, pawpaws, kiwis, grapes, pears, and peaches rather than just the standard apples. It promises to be a botanical laboratory worth watching.
Meanwhile, Wholistic Land Care Consulting is taking off to an appreciative, eager clientele. Already, Nadeau has accomplished site analysis and created game plans for meadow conversions in the region.
He works with individual clients, but he also creates science project course curriculums for schools. In one case, he studied the terrain surrounding a school campus and worked with the students to find solutions of bio-filtration gardens and meadows to solve drainage issues.
By remaining active with the implementation process, the students gained hands-on experience with caveats and solutions. But these are just two examples of how Michael Nadeau is changing the face of the region for the better.
“I have so many things I want to do,” he shared. And we’re all the beneficiaries. When land is healed from within, the entire configuration of creatures can celebrate the triumph. It’s a major victory. For more information, go to www.michaelnadeau.org.