Himalayan Balsam pulling 2024 – how did we do?

Invasive Non-Native Species (INNS), such as Himalayan Balsam, are one of the top drivers of biodiversity loss.  Typically, INNS grow bigger, faster and out compete native plants for light and space. The likes of Himalayan Balsam attract pollinators away from our native plants, which decreases their pollination success rates. Having not co-evolved with the ecosystem they find themselves in, they are not kept in check by natural predators or diseases and when they die back to nothing in the winter, they leave the sandy soils of the River Rother’s banks vulnerable to further erosion following high rainfall and stormy weather.

That is why it is SO rewarding to be able to report that this year ERA held five successful and highly satisfying Balsam pulling sessions, amounting to some 75 work hours completed. We are SO grateful to all who took part. Participants aged from 5 to 80-something, but all enjoyed the work and many fascinating conversations took place while we beavered away!

As the plants could now be expelling their copious seeds (up to 800 seeds per plant, expelled to a distance up to 5m) it is ill-advised to continue now or we might inadvertently spread seeds to new areas in the mud of our boots or the folds of our clothes.

Hopefully, by this time next year we will have made contact with even more landowners and been given permission to pull out Balsam on even more land – do let us know any contacts you may have that could be relevant for that. It would be really good if we could now begin to work systematically from the beginnings of tributaries down towards the main river.

It has also been suggested to me that Balsam pulling might be suitable as a corporate team-building activity – again, someone reading this may have more insight or a contact that might help us take that idea forward? Or maybe parish councils could add to their litter picking days, some Balsam pulling days?

We achieved considerably more than last year, and could see the impact of those previous endeavours. Instead of separate plants growing about 8cm from each other, they were about 30cm apart in areas we had worked on last year.

Given that the seeds can remain viable for up to 5 years this will be an ongoing project. Hopefully we will continue to make each year more impactful than the previous one, but can certainly allow ourselves a moment of pride in what we achieved this year!

Let’s take a look at the numbers . . .

Over the course of five Himalayan Balsam pulling sessions ERA clocked up 75 individual hours of work, and I need to extend a huge THANK YOU to the 14 people who took part. But, what does that work out at in plants pulled or seeds prevented from maturing and spreading?

If we estimate that most of our volunteers were probably on task for something like 50 minutes per hour (we had to walk into, and out of, the sites and between areas of Balsam), that would be:

75 x 50 = 3750 minutes

During our penultimate session we did some light-hearted ‘time trials’ to see how many plants we could pull out in a minute. Paul took the gold medal, pulling out 34 plants! So, a typical average might be something like 20 plants per minute. That gives us an estimate of the total number of plants we pulled out:

3750 x 20 = 75,000 plants pulled out

The Royal Horticultural Society says each plant can make up to 800 seeds. Let’s estimate that 600 might be a realistic typical average number of seeds per plant:

75,000 x 600 = 45,000,000

I estimate that ERA’s Himalayan Balsam pulling this year has prevented some 45 million seeds being produced and then spread along the Rother Valley!

Well, that was worth getting out of bed for!!