The challenges of managing invasive plants

I have begun research into managing several invasive plants on my property. I am also figuring out how to marshal my resources, mostly time and energy, into a management/containment strategy for two non-native invasive plants, one just everywhere and all around a troublesome plant.

The first known challenge is the blackberry bushes. They are pretty much everywhere in the vicinity. Now I like blackberries as much, if not more than, the next person, but they are running all through the back area out of the forest behind my house, growing into my front planting beds and poking out in all kinds of unexpected places. My strategy here has been to cut them back as they annoy me or prevent me from addressing other issues. I want to develop a more intentional strategy, but right now I’m satisfied to incrementally attack as best I can.

The second known challenge is English ivy. Like the blackberries, they are running all through the back area out of the forest behind my house, growing into the north side of the house. I cut the stuff back near the house last fall, but it wasn’t nearly aggressive enough. The blackberries and the ivy have an unholy and very prickly alliance that is problematic, especially around the house and the heat pump. I have begun a more intentional approach to cutting the ivy back from those areas. My current limiting factor is the capacity of my yard waste container. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve donned head-to-toe coverage and heavy-duty gloves to protect myself from the plant’s skin-irritating oil, and made significant progress. I still have to rake out the cleared areas from stray leaves so they don’t root and propagate.

Ivy cut back from the north side of the house

My third challenge is the Japanese knotweed. That’s going to take a more deliberate and targeted chemical approach toward the end of summer. I’m likening this to a long-term war of attrition. This is the one area where my long-term goal is eventual eradication.

I’ll be reporting on my efforts periodically.

The Story of Storytelling Data

Storytelling data is a kind of test data used for humane database training and development. Storytelling data is data that tells a story to the user about the purpose and functions of a database. Ideally, it allows users to envision their work in a database, and understand its core functionality without needing a lot of technical documentation.

Creating storytelling data is itself a way of exploring the database your team is developing. The data is a jumping-off point for team conversations about how to make the database better, easier to use, more helpful to the customer, more equitable and inclusive, giving you deeper respect and understanding of the data you are managing.

When you begin creating storytelling data, think about the purpose of the data, your database customers create, and why they are managing it. What problems are they trying to solve? What are they trying to achieve in the world? What kind of data are they collecting, and why?

If the data is about people, think about those people, not in the abstract, but individuals with plans and projects of their own. If the data is about things or systems of things. think about those things and systems in relation to individual people.

As with any toolset, it’s the user’s commitment to specific values that will determine how the toolset will perform. Some of the ideas and concepts I’m working with include:

  • If you suspect that the UI is brittle, build storytelling data to expose and explore the brittleness that can help the team see where more work is needed.
  • If you think that your development is missing needed nuance in DEI, write data to show that weakness. Consider getting input on your storytelling data from the groups you suspect would be impacted and pay them equitably for their time sharing their lived experiences with you. This can include, but is not limited to, members from the disability, BIPOC, LGBTQ, parolee populations.
  • Better still, hire representatives from marginalized groups to help you build the storytelling data and encourage them to educate your team about the issues they face in seeing stories like theirs represented in your database.

When I first began working with storytelling data, I was just trying to save time composing screenshots for documentation. As I continued to build it out, my team had conversations about using storytelling to model rich data to expose brittle UI so that the team could make the UI more flexible to accommodate more data and more complex data. Additionally, we discussed how storytelling data could show where our working assumptions could be made more equitable and inclusive. It’s the conversations that are sparked by the use of storytelling data that are the generative power of the tool.