[pct-l] Annoying Plants along the PCT

[Brick Robbins <brick@fastpack.com>]

At 07:34 AM 2/4/99 -0500, Ginny wrote:

>Are foxtails also a problem on the PCT? 

YESSSSSS.

There was one secion in the Piutes (Section F) where I vividly remember the foxtails.

They were overgrowing the trail for several miles. I had short gaitors over my running shoes, otherwise I would have gone insane. As it was, the very bottom of my shoe tounges were exposed, and they would fill up something awfull. The damn foxtails would even poke through the mesh of the shoe itself. Dogs would have had a VERY bad time in this secion. I remember reading in a trail register "Will the foxtails NEVER end?????"

Another anoying plant was what the guidebook called "stick seeds." I have no idea what they are really called. They send up knee high stalks with a couple of dozen rice-grain sized sticky seeds at the end. These things overhang the trail by the thousands. When you pick them off, they leave a sticky film on your legs/hands/boots, whatever. I ended up carying a comb handy to remove them from my leg hair every 15 minutes or so. They seemed to grow along the medium elevation wetter secions of the PCT. I remember starting to see them around the Feather River, but that was probably the time they went to seed. 

An even worse  plant that is taking over throughout the northern secions is the exotic "star thistle."

Here is an AP story about the plane
=======================
 Star thistle ranges far, spreading its misery 

 ASSOCIATED PRESS 

20-Jan-1999 Wednesday 

SAN FRANCISCO -- Ouch! To the dismay of farmers, hikers, bicyclists and just about anybody venturing off the pavement, the prickly yellow star thistle is overrunning California. 

In fact, the noxious, plant has become a major menace in many parts of the West, ruining grazing land, pushing out other plants and killing livestock as its needle-sharp spines puncture man and beast. 

"The star thistle has become the most common plant in the state, and it is out of control," said Joe Di Tomaso at the Department of Weed Science at UC Davis. "It already occupied the valleys and foothill regions. Now it is expanding into the coast ranges and in the Sierra up to 5,000 feet." 

The weed, which apparently landed in California around the time of the Gold Rush, grows in dense clumps and can rise to four feet or more in height. 

A star-shaped cluster of spines surrounds yellow flowers. Even in death, when the plant is dry and brown, the spines remain and will stab anything that ventures too near. 

The thistle dominates the landscape, bumping off other plants in part by sending a tap root down as far as eight feet below the surface, sucking up all the moisture from the soil. 

Some scientists think the plant may destroy its neighbors with a substance called an allelochemical that can stunt the growth of nearby plants. 

Spines aside, the plant is also poisonous in large quantities and can kill horses that eat it in early spring before the spines emerge. 

"This is the biggest single threat to agriculture since the Medfly," said Assemblyman Thomas "Rico" Oller, R-Roseville. Oller, who held hearings on the star thistle menace last month, plans legislation to control the plant. 

In 1965, about 1.2 million acres of star thistle were found in the state.  Two decades later, the invader covered 7.9 million acres. Now, the thistle blankets more than 20 million acres -- about 22 percent of the state -- according to the state Department of Food and Agriculture. 

"It's just a nasty weed all the way around," Scott Stone, whose family ranches about 10,000 acres near Woodland in Yolo County, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "The cattle don't like to go into it, and the dogs won't work through it. It's one of the worst problems we have." 

Stone said the plant has made about 15 percent of his family's rangeland useless. 

"The star thistle not only displaces native plants," said Jake Sigg, president of the California Native Plant Society, "but also native animals that depend on those plants, such as deer, quail, rabbits, skunks and raccoons that have co-evolved with the native plants over the eons." 

The plant is thought to have originated in Turkey and Armenia as a weed that grew amid alfalfa. American ranchers imported alfalfa to feed miners' animals, and the thistle came along for the ride. 

The star thistle has many advantages over its competition, said Michael Pitcairn, a research scientist at the state Department of Food and Agriculture. 

It produces a huge number of seeds -- as many as 29,000 per square meter -- and an astonishingly high 95 percent of the seeds germinate. 

Fighting the weed is a daunting task. You can burn it, but it has to be done every year and it creates air pollution. You can mow it, but you have to do it several times a year. 

You can try to graze it away, with cattle in the early part of its growth before the spines appear and later with goats, which don't seem to mind the spines. 

The state also is looking at biological controls, especially the hairy weevil, a beetle that drills a hole into flower buds and lays its eggs inside. The larvae then feed on the star thistle seeds. 

There's also a new herbicide called Transline, which kills both the seeds and the mature plant. But it's expensive and environmentalists dislike it. 

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