In 2020 and 2021, some pot growers to comply with regulations, were required to weedwhack 6 miles of road. ( I had a really bad feeling about the weed whacking, and that gut instinct was more right than I ever could have imagined) , I asked them not to touch my side of the road, they did it anyway.
The meadows in my watershed were a rare remarkable example of a California native meadow ecosystem. That one act of weed whacking two years in a row, at the wrong time of year, with dirty weedwhackers, containing seeds from three high invasive grasses, (avena fatua, briza ( rattlesnake grass) red rip gut brome, and star thistle) has destroyed and changed the our meadow ecosystem throughout the watershed in just a few short years. There are no simple solutions. Invasive annual grasses are the tinder that drives out of control wildfires in the west, and creates a fast acting loss of biodiversity . Though some invasive grasses like rattlesnake grass can be controlled with fire, other like avena fatua, cannot be. Avena fatua is even immune to herbacides, and can dominate after a fire. It is unbelievable how dense these grasses grow, taking up every square inch of soil, nothing can compete. They create thick mats of material that dries out in late spring.
Four years ago I started experimenting with hand pulling the avena fatua that dominated a steep cut bank. What happened is I got a bank of native clover.
The first year it dominated, this year I only found 5 stalks, and the seed bank that it was suppressing was three species of ca native clover. Tom Cat, foothill, and red, and ca wooly sunflowers popping up too. What a little weeding can do!
