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King County, Washington

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Published July 5, 2017 at 4032 × 3024 in A Day in the Life of a Weed Specialist: Saving Skykomish from Orange Hawkweed

Controlling a high priority noxious weed.

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Goats 🐐 and sheep 🐑 beware! Goatsrue is a toxic plant that ironically was introduced to this country as a possible forage plant. It’s in the pea or legume family and resembles other plants like wild licorice and crownvetch and vetch. It’s an upright perennial plant with deep roots, hollow stems and non-bristly seed pods. Flowers can be purple or white. The seeds are extremely persistent so plants can continue to emerge for decades once the plants have gone to seed in an area. Sometimes we don’t see any plants for many years and then find a new one emerging. Monitoring is essential for controlling plants like goatsrue. It’s not legal to buy this plant in the United States but people sometimes get seeds on the internet so buyer beware! Always look for Latin names of plants you buy, this one is Galega officinalis. Don’t be fooled by the pretty flowers! There are non-invasive species that are just as pretty that aren’t invasive. Photos by Tom Erler. #goatrue #galegaofficinalis #galega #toxicplants #poisonousplants #livestock #dontplantapest #prettybutinvasive

Garden loosestrife reaching out its long red stolons to find new territory to capture! Plants are fascinating. These red underwater stems grow up to 10 feet long and help garden loosestrife seek out new solid ground to root into. And once it’s growing, sediment builds up around the stems, creating more land for it to grow on, eventually allowing it to fill open water shallows and form dense monocultures. It’s a slow but inexorable process that is a huge bummer for the plants and wildlife that were using that habitat. So we intervene and try to keep that from happening. And we get to enjoy the pretty scenery in the process so that’s good! Photo by Karen Peterson. #reachingout #stolons #wetlandweeds #gardenloosestrife #lysimachiavulgaris #uwarboretum #lakewashington

Teasel is flowering! I think this is one of the easiest plants to learn and it is pretty cool to look at too. Once it flowers it can be over 6 feet tall, although some are shorter. Flowers often grow in bands, with only one or two bands open at a time, giving the egg shaped flower heads an interesting look. See the little bee 🐝 burrowing into one of the flowers? The whole plant has rather dangerous looking spines but they’re not as painful as they look. Another super cool feature are the miniature pools of water where the leaves attach to the stem. Look for little insects and maybe even a little frog 🐸! In King County teasel is mostly along road and field edges but sometimes we find big patches of it. It’s on the state noxious weed list mostly to help farmers get control where it is infesting hay fields and pastures. It’s not necessary to control it everywhere you see it, but if you want advice on how to control it, check out our website or get in touch! Pics 1 and 2 by Maria Winkler, pics 3-6 by Tricia MacLaren. #commonteasel #teasel #dipsacusfullonum

Ouch! Yellow starthistle scattered over 7 plus acres! This plant is not usually found in western Washington so it probably hitched a ride from somewhere south or east. Each plant can have up to 150,000 seeds so it only takes a few to quickly take over an area. Mowing or other disturbance can help spread it more. Fortunately this was found by a county employee before it spread onto other properties so there’s a chance to contain it. But yikes! Related to knapweed and originally from the Mediterranean, yellow starthistle is also called Barnaby thistle. Horses can get a serious illness called chewing disease from eating it and cattle can be harmed by the spines and malnourished when they graze range areas infested with it. Needless to say we will work hard to keep this population from spreading any more! Photos by rb. #yellowstarthistle #centaureasolstitialis #starthistle #chewingdisease #badforhorses

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