The Real GOATs

Sometimes, the old ways are the best ways.

When my parents moved us to what was then a very bucolic area of Baltimore County in 1955 (where they had just gotten electricity twenty years before!) the yard was completely overgrown with weeds, grasses, bermudagrass, wiregrass, curly dock, burdock, crabgrass, Canada thistle, mugwort, poison ivy, and you know all the rest. 

I think Dad was thinking about hiring a airplane to fly over and drop some benign defoliant when the farmer across the dell (I couldn't resist) came over with a long rope in hand and a goat tied to the other end. "Just tie him up to that tree," he said, indicating a mighty Juglans nigra that was to drop tasty black walnuts on the yard for years, "and I'll be back next week to round him up."

I know the legend is that goats will eat anything that comes out of the earth. True! This goat gnawed his way through that foliage in no time at all, and the next thing I know, grass replaced the weeds, and I, with a lawn mower, replaced the goat.

So I was glad to see that New York City realized that goats could help them with their problem in Riverside Park. They brought down twenty of them to the park from Green Goats Farm in Rhinebeck, NY, to bring chemical-free weed removal to the Big Green Apple.

John Herrold, interim president and chief executive of the Riverside Park Conservancy, was pointing out to a reporter the other day "the steepest river bank east of the Palisades." 

"Imagine trying to keep your balance while you're pulling out invasive plants so that you can plant native species that will better hold the soil and provide better habitat for the wildlife."

(A side note: Italy being a country full of steep rocky hills, cows do not do well grazing there, but goats thrive, which is why the original ricotta and other Italian cheeses come from goat milk).

And what's more, goats are hungry dudes! They don't discriminate a bit! "They love this stuff," Herrold says. "They eat poison ivy, they eat the porcelain berry, they eat the multiflora rose and that's what we're trying to get rid of."

To use modern office parlance, the twenty goats have been tasked with chawing their way through two acres of Riverside Park by the end of summer. I will try to get a report and let you know how they do!