Excursion 3

Like our first two weeks here went spent this last week pulling Mustard at Largo Vista. We started our week with a handful of our usual Sunday volunteers pulling Mustard for a few hours before we were invited to the local fire crew’s family day picnic. We got a short tour of their barracks and vehicles before they unfortunately received a call and had to leave. Not too tired from being out on the call they came to help us pull Mustard for the next few days. About 20 or so other local volunteers also came out everyday to help make quick work of pulling the last bit of Mustard. At one point near the end of the week Brian and Danny used the GPS to map the boundary of the area that we pulled; we had done a total of 87 acres. On the last day of our hitch we had to make sure that all of our piles were sufficiently covered by plastic, preferably, or sticks so that the seeds would be “solarized” and not be able to reproduce new plants. We learned from Katie that invasive removal on this scale was something new that the Forest Service was trying out as a protocol for the next year. Hopefully our last three weeks worth of work wasn’t in vain and the Mustard won’t return.