Draco Hill has about 40 acres of degraded woodlands, with a range from old red oaks, cottonwoods, bass wood and black cherries to invasive autumn olives, garlic mustard and aggressive raspberries and honey locusts. To manage these woodlands we are tackling the invasive species, opening up the forest floor and watching to see what comes in. Then we plan to encourage good hardwood trees and protect them from the deer population with cages and shelters.

Some areas of our woodlands were worked over pretty hard by cattle grazing for decades until 1999, and some were select cut some time in the mid-1900s. This is our opportunity to repair some of that destructive human intervention with some less destructive and more carefully directed mowing, pulling, burning and then planting.