Chris Geiger:

00:00:14

Okay, we're going to get going. Everybody. Have a seat please. There are a few other chairs over here if you need them. Okay. We're starting. Hello. Interrupt your sentence. Okay. Welcome to the IPM TAC meeting, technical advisory committee meeting for San Francisco in case you’re lost. I'm Chris Geiger and we have a speaker for you today. And the usual agenda. We'll have some announcements first, the speaker who is Kevin Woolen from Public Utilities East Bay and a little time for a problem-solving session on pest management in general. And then following that we will adjourn. So, first of all I'd like to just go around the room and do introductions, just name and department. You want to start Kevin?

Introductions:

00:01:30

[Inaudible - introductions of people in audience]

Chris Geiger:

00:02:39

Thank you. So, in case you didn't notice, we're doing videos these days, courtesy of Pestec. Thank you very much for this and we're trying to get it down on the sound. I got a little tangled up last month, so bear with us. Announcements. First of all, does anyone else have any announcements to make like events, accomplishments, kudos, anything? Yes, Luis.

Luis:

00:03:07

So, we applied for and received a citywide exemption for a new material, Cilantra. It's a coal calciferol, it's a rodent bait, is the only active ingredient. So, it's a Vitamin D3 rodent bait. This is the only rodenticide that we have that can be used outdoors in natural areas. And so, we are rolling it out in different places. And, the hope is that this is going to be more palatable than, or accepted better by the rodents, than the previous, coal calciferol bait that we had, which was Teron 3. So, we will give you an update when we have that. The other one is that Senes Tech. I think we talked about it previously. This is a rodenticide that's a birth control. So, we hope to do a pilot with that very soon at Pier 96, which is the recology transfer station. So, those are the two main updates right now.

Chris Geiger:

00:04:03

Thanks. Anyone else? Announcements?

Speaker 1:

00:04:12

Okay, I have a couple. I went down to, courtesy of, Rec Park and Salvador, we went down and checked out the foam stream, weed foamer, a demonstration. I think maybe Rec Park already had demo.

Speaker 5:

00:04:29

Yeah. So, they were trying out down a, it's like creek, along the walkway there where they have all pavers and lots of weeds popping up between the pavers. So, we'll see how that works. But, relevant to that, next month's speaker is Cheryl Willins. So, Cheryl is the UC IPM extensionist for Southern California. She's a weed specialist. This is her thing. And she's been testing out some of the mechanical weed control methods, especially steamers and foamers and doing some comparisons. So, it should be really interesting. She's going to come all the way up here and give a presentation. So, it should be a good session. Another announcement is, we have a grant proposal to extend our work on the low-income housing--follow-up on low income housing pest prevention efforts. And you might recall that we had spent a couple of years working with Pestec and with the Mayor's Office of Housing and with about 12 different developers to install pest prevention elements into low income housing around San Francisco as part of the rebuild for the San Francisco Housing Authority.

Chris Geiger:

00:05:49

And now we got through the first hurdle on a DPR grant for that. So, we're writing that up now. It's due December 19th. So, if everyone in the room crosses their fingers, maybe we'll get it. It's like $140,000. Another announcement is you might have heard the news about the Duane Johnson Roundup case. It went to appeal. That was the one where I'm a gardener and Venetia I guess sued Monsanto. He's a victim of Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and he had used a lot of Roundup during his career there; and it was ruled--the initial court case ruled in his favor, 240 something million dollars against Monsanto, which is with 89. Thank you. You got it. All right. And it went to appeal and I personally, I was pessimistic. I thought that the appeal was going, it was going to be overturned because of the causal connection, but it was not, they, the judge did reduce the award by quite a bit. I think it's-- do you have the number on that?

Chris Geiger:

00:07:07

Yeah. They took off 200,000 or 200 million. A little difference. He's still getting 40 something or 40 or 70. I can't remember. Yeah, he's getting a substantial amount, which is good. But the implications are that something like, 8,000 other lawsuits pending against Monsanto for this. So, it'll be really interesting to see what happens and also to see what happens with other judges when they're looking at the causality--the causal connection. This is what happens when the science is uncertain. It kind of goes to the courts, right. And so, we'll see. But it's an interesting situation for Monsanto, which is now Bayer, I guess. I think that's all I have is, except, yeah, I announced about Cheryl be here next month. We're going to have--it'll be a really good session next month. And now I guess I will introduce Kevin Woolen who most of you know. (applause)

Chris Geiger:

00:08:15

And Kevin, okay, you started in DPW. Was it public works where you started? Oh, probably before that. Okay. Yeah, that's right and then Rec Park and then water department. Yeah. Right. And he won an innovator award at the state level. An IPM innovator award, oh, Rec Park, Okay.

Kevin Woolen:

00:08:41

I was the IPM Coordinator at the time.

Chris Geiger:

00:08:44

Okay. All right. All right. So, but it's, you know, you can brag. It's all right. You can brag. So, Kevin's been working on a lot of projects that are different from many of us. Range land IPM is a whole different thing and invasive species on range lands are a whole different thing, with a lot of factors that we don't have to deal with in our situations here in the city. So, I thought it'd be great to have him come in and tell the story.

Kevin Woolen:

00:09:09

Thank you Chris. I will. Everybody hear me okay? Okay, great. So, like Chris said, I work on the Alameda watershed that is home to a lot of awesome wildlife. And I don't know, anybody here live in San Francisco? Or I'm sure a few. Okay. So, how many of you know that San Francisco owns 36,000 plus acres over in the East Bay? Most people? Okay. Anybody ever just drive by it and at least appreciate the, the beauty from afar? I get to, I'm very fortunate to get to see it up close.

Kevin Woolen:

00:09:45

It is a watershed that's a largely closed to the public. There are, parts of it that are leased out to East Bay Regional Parks and a trail goes through from East Bay Regional Parks through it in the Aolani wilderness. So, it is a part of the Aolani wilderness, I guess you would say, to give the bigger picture, as far as the ecosystem goes. So, we have elk, probably 70 or 80, that, you know, is the count of, of elk out there. That's a bald eagle. We have Golden Eagles and I'll show you in a minute a whole bunch of different raptors that are very impressive and I get to watch do their thing because there's not a lot of people out there. So, most of these animals aren't, you know, just running the other way when they see a person. And there's no hunting or fishing.

Kevin Woolen:

00:10:39

So, wildlife feels pretty secure I think out there. That's a Red Tail Hawk that's is kind of soaring with some of the neighboring properties, buildings. And then you know, that little guy there, the cows, which are everywhere. And I'll talk more about as part of the range land. So, I'm going to start out talking a little bit about the, the range land to kind of get you familiar because I think it's important to understand that, before we start talking about details of weed management. So, the [inaudible] olins, I'll talk about at the end and some experiments that we've done and some pretty scientific, some anecdotal and observational. But in the end, I think you'll leave here with some information that's valuable and hopefully a lot of questions because there's still a lot of unanswered questions about this invasive weed.

Kevin Woolen:

00:11:36

And we call all of our invasive weeds non-native invasive plants. There are native invasive plants in grasslands, but I'm not going to cover that today. The right or the left to go forward. Right? Okay. So, this is the Alameda watershed. So that gives you the-- bright green line and gives you the perimeter. Like I said, 36,000 plus acres. It's home to rare and threatened species. The mission is to provide the best environment for production, collection and storage of the highest quality water for the City of San Francisco. And I work for the Natural Resources Division, which protect water and natural resources and their conservation enhancement, restoration and maintenance, while balancing costs and benefits, which is always the hard part. Right? Now you see some highlighted areas right here. Those are privately owned parcels that interlock with our property that we don't have any say over how they're managed. So, that can, you know, obviously create us some issues as well.

Kevin Woolen:

00:12:51

The reservoirs are these two big bodies of waters here. All of the contours you see drain into those reservoirs, right. So ultimately, most of the watershed, most of the waters flow into there. There's also some gravel quarries and nurseries and things like that. So that leads to land uses. Ecosystem services. That's the part that I probably play the biggest role in as the range land and the services that, that land provides for the cattle that graze that land. And that's a mutualistic relationship between the City and County of San Francisco and these various, lease holders on the land, the cattle graze these plants that grow like crazy all winter for fire suppression and weed control. They definitely help us on that. They also, at times if the, if the grazing is too intense can be a detriment because of the disturbance, right? So, we have to balance that. We have ecologists and biologists and range land managers that work with our leasees to make sure that the right amount of cattle on there. That the water and supplements are put in the right spots to make sure they're grazing in a way that's not negatively impacting our lands. Because it can cause erosion and several other things.

Kevin Woolen:

00:14:22

I also work with water supply and treatment. So, the people that, actually make sure that all the valves are in the right position, the filtration is working like it's supposed to when the water's flowing to the city at the rate that demand requires. This is a giant infrastructure project. Does anybody here know about the Calaveras Dam Project? Everybody's pretty much familiar with it. Okay. So, there's the Calaveras Reservoir, we're rebuilding the dam. Or building actually a new dam and all of the materials, or most of the materials are taken from the site, from our lands, and then put to build this new structure and eventually the height of the reservoir will go over the old dam structure. But you can see that causes a lot of disturbance, right?

Kevin Woolen:

00:15:23

And SEQUA [?] requires that we offset or mitigate these impacts by enhancing habitat. So, we have these biological habitat restoration sites, BHR, we call him. And I also work with closely with them on pest management and trying to help them in the restoration process. And this is a little different than maybe some habitat or, you know, natural areas if you will. These are actually our requirement. So, we have to meet certain reductions in non-native plants and increases, if you will, in cover of native plants. So, there's, there's requirement to it. Then we talked about the gravel quarry. This is just, you know, one of the commercial things. There are also these big nurseries that I interact with to make sure that they're complying. I'm doing the best I can to make sure they are complying and in compliance with our ordinances and state regulations, this and that.

Kevin Woolen:

00:16:29

So, that's kind of the job. An overview of it, right. We do have tiger salamanders, red lake frogs, whip snakes, and some pretty rare birds. I don't know how rare they, if they're actually in endangered, but Merlin's they're not very plentiful out there, but I see one occasionally. And also, I've had the opportunity to talk to, Han's Peters, who's like a local there. And he literally wrote the book on Raptors. He's got a published book, so he's kind of fun to catch out there on the range land. He's got permission to go out there and do surveys and studies. So IPM, I view my role as a safeguarding--making sure that we're not doing anything out there when we're controlling these pests that is a detriment to our mission statement.

Kevin Woolen:

00:17:28

I take that seriously as does our regulatory compliance. So the other thing, if you work for maybe a smaller organization. We have a staff of people that I vet things through, it goes up to the regulatory compliance folks, you know, legal experts on the subject matter ecologist biologist--looking at this and making sure that we're not having an adverse effect and that we are getting the desired result, which is helpful for me. But safeguard the water quality, the natural resources and the ecosystem services, which also, you know, that doesn't include the cattle, but there are other things that we want to make sure we're protecting out there. The mitigation sites I talked about. Range land production. So, that's my primary function. I'm assigned to range land, okay. I get kind of involved in all this other stuff because I'm a subject matter expert.

Kevin Woolen:

00:18:33

But a range land production and productivity is the key. So, if it negatively impacts forage, I need to begin to find out what process we're going to use to reverse that effect. And typically, that is weed management. So again, it's in a little, maybe a little different structure. It's not aesthetic. Nobody cares what that looks like out there so much. It's strictly-- my triggers are, "is it going to, are these plants going to negatively impact the flow of water, a fire or flood,"--cause fire or flood problems? Because we have liability if that spreads from our property to neighboring properties and vice versa. So, I work with a lot of neighboring organizations and weed management areas, things like that over the East Bay.

Kevin Woolen:

00:19:29

And you can see how it's easy to fall in love with the protection of this land. It's beautiful. This is just some tar weed, a native plant growing in the background. You see the rolling hills with oaks and other scrub communities on it. I talked about a herd of elk. You know, native plants, wildflowers. That's a black [inaudible] kite, with a little field mouse. That's one of the, not Kevin photos. The rest of these, most of these are my photos, but there are some that aren't. Casterals, that's a burrowing owl again, there are several nesting pairs of Bald Eagles and Golden Eagles out there. And then Red Tails are as common out there is probably pigeons in the city. They're just everywhere. It seemed with Casterals. They're pretty, pretty common.

Kevin Woolen:

00:20:20

So the pests, largely it's invasive plants, but we also have wild pigs and this is some of the disturbance they cause, and that's right, on one of our mitigation sites. So, we have a responsibility, via the permit that we got to manage these wild pigs. There's also, you know, the Rangey, so that's also an effort that takes place across different boundaries--property boundaries and things like that. This is. . . if you'd like, yeah. You want to slow me down a bit. Okay. So feral pigs are trapped and euthanized. that's the state regulation. If you trap an animal, you can't move the animal and the population is such that population control is necessary, especially on large parcels of land where there is no hunting, you know. So, it is a problem.

Kevin Woolen:

00:21:26

I've seen hordes of like 60 or 70 wild pigs flying across the landscape. And they can wreak havoc in more ways than this. They can also contaminate water quality because they carry a lot of disease and bacteria as well. Invasive plants, like I said, it's sort at the top of our list. This Is some artichoke thistle, which is one of my, you know, top weeds at the-- I call them the cowboys or the ranchers they don't like this. The cattle won't eat it. The cattle won't eat it, or they'll stay away from the area that it's in. It causes problems for us. Yeah. They want that rectified. And I'll talk a little bit about control of each one of these in a minute. This one is ground squirrels and when I first got there, it's like, what, you know, what's the big deal about a couple of ground squirrels and of course, you know, cattlemen will tell you, maybe a cow will twist their ankle or something.

Kevin Woolen:

00:22:21

It's such thing like that or anything that might harm a cow is a public enemy type of thing. I don't subscribe to that. There are things that I have to take in. I have to kind of make an opinion as to what's fact and was just sort of hype. But these ground squirrels, we found out, during some heavy rains, can cause problems. And this is a small dam that is on a stock pond. So, it's where we build these little ponds for cattle to take in water. And that collapsed during a rainstorm, not this last year, the year before, and these bags here are just kind of plugging the holes. The weather was such that we couldn't get heavy equipment out there and start making repairs.

Kevin Woolen:

00:23:20

The problem is that, you know, is that, like I said, we have these tiger salamanders are reptiles out there. So, we had to get a biologist out to survey the entire area. Scope the holes, the whole area to make sure that nothing's down in there and then temporary plugged them, to keep them from further eroding. And then, you know, they went in with equipment and repaired this particular one. But that has to go through a review, right? So, it's not like things can just happen. There's this whole environmental review process within the department. At times that, seems to cause folks some frustration. Other times, you know, it's, --well, all the time I think it's the right thing to do, but sometimes it's frustrating for folks that in this situation where it seems like an emergency to them.

Kevin Woolen:

00:24:14

This is a pathogen, plant pathogens. There are some trees that are legacy valley oaks out there, right? They're older trees, big magnificent, that have just been sort of collapsing, you know, structurally. So, we had plant pathologist come out and because we were worried about is that, you know, what's causing, it turns out it was a negative or a native, a pathogen native to the soil that, because of drought stress, the trees are more susceptible. And that's what ultimately is causing the ruin of some of the trees. And they're typically on, you know, the hotter slopes, the south facing slopes, things like that. So, a place like that. But one of my jobs is to make those observations and report that stuff and get the right expert into a deal with it.

Kevin Woolen:

00:25:14

And this one, sorry about the bird picture here. It is a little disturbing, but I wanted to make a point because we think often in terms of protecting our infrastructure from animals, right? From birds, bird feces that might get into the water supply. And that's important. There's no question about that. But we also have to remember that, you know, we are a water and power company essentially, the PUC and these power lines, birds will get up there, roost, spread their wings to warm up. And I was there when this happened-- I think your brother was actually, we were doing an estimate and it was-- the power flickered, you know, you can hear the buzzing and so we all ran out and, of course, the staff that work there, sort of knew the story because it's happened in the past and we go out there and this a vulture, fell dead from the electric or electrical shock.

Kevin Woolen:

00:26:22

So, you know, I engage with engineers and talk to them about design and what can we do to sort of start thinking about prevention of this type of thing. I don't know if you could stop it 100%, but in a place where we know it recurs, it seems like we could do something, you know. So, we're working on that. The other thing I kind of discovered is that people inherently have a bias. If that were a golden eagle or a bald eagle, there would be something, you know, done about it super fast. But because it's a vulture and everybody sort of like, eh, who cares? It wasn't as big of a deal. But I felt like it was because it's something that can be prevented. I think that covers this slide.

Kevin Woolen:

00:27:09

Non-native invasive plants. It takes up about, oh, 75, 80% of my time. The rest of this stuff, a lot of it is contracted out. I interact with the contractors to follow-up and monitor. But the actual workout in the field is with these non-native invasive plants. Medusahead or taeniatherum is just the grass, so you're thinking, what's the big deal? Don't cattle eat grass? Well, not all grasses, right? So, this particular grass high in silica has these really long, twisted ons that look like Medusa's head. That's where it gets the name, right. So that cattle won't graze and it has a minimal impact, but it has an impact, not so much, immediate because it grows in the season where most of our native grasses are senesing. It is the thatch that it produces that chokes out the native grasses, the next year, you know, once the thatch builds up that impacts range land production.

Kevin Woolen:

00:28:19

So, we have to work on this. We've tried mowing. There's some research out by a Ditommaso and Kaiser about some applications with a milestone. We did an experiment with that. The thing I don't like about that particular method is that it does impact forbes, that provide a lot of nutrition for cattle. So, you've got to be careful when we make decisions. It's not just will it impact the grass and it will, I believe it did. But what else are the collateral things? So, we decided not to use that method. We're using mowing and intense grazing at times to sort of suppress that particular one. A barbed goat grass, we didn't have that, or at least we didn't know we had that on our property until this year.

Kevin Woolen:

00:29:17

And on one of our mitigation sites, those are intensely monitored, and they found what they first reported to me as a small patch. Then we got out there and it sprawled and now it's a couple of acres. So, it's been there for a while. A couple of years anyway. And this particular grass--is anybody familiar with barbed goat grass grass? You probably are. Anybody that works out open big open spaces and grasslands may have dealt with this grass. Probably not so much in the city or parks, it takes places that are bigger open spaces. But the problem with it is it has this, unlike the Medusahead that just sort of like of repellent to perbiberi [?] This one actually has these barbs on it. So, if it gets stuck in an eye on the cow, it could literally keep going into the brain.

Kevin Woolen:

00:30:11

If it gets stuck in an intestine it can kill the cow or grazing animal. So that's a big, huge one for, for range land management. We also found another patch that's outside of the B char sites. Now these habitat restoration sites are kind of in layers. There are these intensely managed types that are completely fenced off from grazing, which doesn't make a lot of sense. That really leaves opportunities for other problems, but it's the way it is for now. I think eventually once the plantings are establishing and can't be eaten by the cattle as well, that probably will be braced. But, a lot of the, say if it's a 500-acre parcel, 420 acres are going to be range lands still. So, I'm definitely intensely work on those parts. And the barbed goat grass there it happens to be inside.

Kevin Woolen:

00:31:10

It will be inside of a site and the one that we found that's just out on open range land, that's the one that, is kind of like, "ah," you know, what are we going to do everything to try and stop it while it's in this initial invasion stage. So, that's huge on my radar. You know, purple and yellow star thistle are widespread on the range land. And we have, we also contract with Alameda County AG and work with weed management areas to help control that. Dittrichia graveolens, or stinkwort, I'll talk a lot about that. That's a picture of it there, sort of in its more mature stage probably, late August, early September before it really starts setting buds and it definitely hasn't flowered yet. And then the artichoke thistle that we talked about and you know the artichoke thistle is fairly easy to control.

Kevin Woolen:

00:32:02

Dittrichia would have been if we would have caught it earlier. It's not something, as I talk about in a minute, that's like, "oh, it's got all these superpowers and can recover from everything." It's, an annual plant and we know that we can manage the production. We can manage the plant. That's what we know for sure about annual plans, right? So, that one can be controlled easier than some of these other ones. It's very difficult to control widespread infestations of grasses in grasslands. That's a tough one, okay. Without impacting other things that we use the grassland for. So, I'm going to talk more about stinkwort. Artichoke thistle is another one that's not so bad to control. It does breed. It's an astro, so prolific seed producer, but it has a sort of short-lived perennial. It could last up to three years or so. But you can dig the tap root out and you know, pretty much wipe out a population in a few days with hard work. And it's not that widespread. It's scattered patches around the watershed.

Kevin Woolen:

00:33:06

So, there's a lot of information up here. I don't expect people to, you know, memorize that. I'm hoping to get this up on Chris's website, but it is important to know. And intimately know the target pest. And people have been doing this for awhile know that, right? I see, Luis says, "Yeah." So, this is an annual plant, you know, two to three feet tall. Actually, it germinates in late winter, early spring, and it can germinate throughout the summer season. Usually when you, I find it happens when we kind of pull up or mow a big patch of it. Then these smaller ones come up. I don't know if they were already germinated and just latent in the soil and bolted once they had that light and nutrients that they didn't have to share. There could be a mechanism for that, internal in the plant.

Kevin Woolen:

00:34:06

But the, the biggest thing to know about this, for someone who's trying to control it, is it has this sticky, resinous oily layer that is intensely aromatic and nauseating at times when you're working in It. It can give you headaches by hand pulling it. It definitely can give a person dermatitis. We've worked in it, you know, hand pulling it and I've got the little rash myself and so have other people who have worked on it. So, that's not really a great solution because the health and safety of our people are as important as managing this. Some people might ask why, why control it? And that's been asking me before. It seems to be a rural weed, which is just disturbed soils. The problem is we have a lot of those on range land because cattle walking through you know, a pasture, walking through it causes some disturbance. Little mud slides cause disturbance.

Kevin Woolen:

00:35:04

Pigs caused disturbance. Turkeys cause disturbance. Vehicles out there. Biologists monitoring, you know, that is all some level of disturbance-- habitat restoration, damn projects, creeks flowing and drying ephemeral pools of water. All of that is some level of disturbance in the system. So, there are a lot of places where it can spread to take root. And I'll talk a little bit in a moment about how we start to monitor how it moves through our property, which is also another really important thing to know. It's difficult to control mostly because of that coating on the leaf. It's hard to get herbicide to the actual cuticle of the plants that can be absorbed and trans-located. It germinates in the winter. I talked about that. It's one of the last annuals to emerge. It's also one of the last, and another important thing to know about, it's one of the last two sunais [?] and it is day length dependent for bud production and flower production.

Kevin Woolen:

00:36:10

So, the fall equinox is what triggers it to flower. And then for anywhere from two weeks after that to a month and a half after that, it can be flowering. And now a lot of that depends on what kind of slope it's growing on, how shady it is, how cool, those type of things. The plant is amazing in that way. It doesn't really seem to have all these little--not to over anthropromorphisize, but they have these little inherent traits that are meant for survival. They evolve these coatings to keep animals from eating them. They evolved these long thorns, these weird ons and silica just because of herbivory. And then, nowadays a more modern era, we try to control them in different ways. Seeds are short lived--three years. That's another important thing to know. So, you're not going to have--some of these annuals may have seeds that live up to 15 or 20 years in the soil, but these are pretty short lived.

Kevin Woolen:

00:37:19

And that's good. That tells me three years of intense management, I can make a serious impact. As long as we can come up with a way to manage them. So, and they're propagated by spreads throughout the watershed by wind, rain, surface water, animals, clothing may also be introduced and spread by vehicles and cattle feed, hay, that might be brought in as a supplement and spread out. And I've seen it, you know, in some of our worst infested areas and we have some hay fields, some leases that folks grow hay that have dittrichia on the roads beside it so the seeds could blow onto that. So, not really far reach to imagine that hay might be one of the problems. And then we already talked about it, you know, where it might be found.

Kevin Woolen:

00:38:11

So, here's Cal Lipsey's website has a, you know, a plant profile on it and you can see the spread. You can see the spread throughout the state. Ground zero is right where I work. It was thought to be introduced in San Jose or Milpitas in that kind of area. Anybody have any other information on that? That's at least one of the documents I read. So, and you know, the graphic sort of shows that. There's the concentration of the dots and it sort of spreads from there. And then this is the invasion curve. And it would've been great if we would have done more here. It would have been okay if we would've intervened a little more here. And I say we, the weed management community, right. Up here where it's established and widespread.

Kevin Woolen:

00:39:06

Like we can see that it is. When I'm managing a, you know, a large parcel of property or like the like here on Midpin, we began to look at it in a way that can we get it off our property and how are we going to keep it off? So, it begins with decontaminating vehicles. The problem with that we've got cattlemen, we got utility companies, all sorts of people that have, there some people are just members of the public, they have property on the other side. Like those little spots I showed you earlier where they're allowed to drive across the watershed to get to their property. They have a right-of-way. So, it's easier-- decontamination is easier said than done. I know people don't like to hear that so much, but we have just produced a decontamination manual, if you will.

Kevin Woolen:

00:39:57

And the bigger challenge than producing and writing it, because that's all textbook, it's all the right things to do--is implementing it. Are we going to get wash stations at every gate? You've worked out there. Is that even possible? You know, get people to do that. And there's some cultural issues, you know, the ranchers don't even really want to acknowledge that, you know, that, that's something that they should do. And I get it, you know, they're busy doing their, carrying out their business, its business for them. But still we're going to have to work on it and it's going to have to be a shift that takes place over time. My idea about this is to try to manage it on the watershed and then do my best to focus on the areas that I know where there's like properties or roads adjacent to our property and monitor that heavily and then keep managing it from there.

Kevin Woolen:

00:40:50

There are different ways to manage it as well. Some really great ideas that we've had that have worked out well and some that aren't, you know, aren't so great. This is a nomad survey that we had in 2009, and dittrichia made the cover. So, it tells you the importance of it or at least the spread of it. And these dots are on our watershed, not unlike the state, you know, widespread. The thing about points like this on a map, it doesn't tell you density or really how widespread these particular patches are. They'll just make a point and say, "Okay, there's dittrichia here and I'm going to show you, in a moment, show you a little more information about it.

Kevin Woolen:

00:41:41

But they actually surveyed every invasive plant that we have on the watershed. We're getting ready to do another such survey, in 2019. So, every 10 years or so they're going to go through and what we're going to find out what kind of shifts in population this time we're adding some aerial mapping because of some of the more widespread spots in terms of polygons instead of points. Especially with Medusahead and purple star thistle and dittrichia.

Question:

00:42:13

Maybe you said this, but is it poisonous to cattle like when they consume the hay?

Kevin Woolen:

00:42:22

Cattle, you know, thank you, because that triggered something I wanted to say. I work out there with some really great, great folks and a lot of fifth generation ranchers and one of them was my manager when I first got there and I won't do the accent, but he speaks to the sort of a John Wayne draw, you know, and he's like, "absolutely no herbivory takes place on this plant." And what I've found is that's by and large true. Deer might nibble at it and you know and don't like it and leave it alone from there. I've seen some little plants nipped at. I've seen some ground squirrels seem to sort of drag it. I have seen cattle stand in it. Okay. And they, they also do this--and they'll rub their face and tar weed and that's a natural insect repellent for them.

Kevin Woolen:

00:43:09

So, if you've ever been around cattle, they often have feces, their own feces that attract a lot of flies. So, they will stand in a patch of it just to kind of get some relief. I don't know how long or anything, but I've seen them do that. I have seen them kind of rub their faces in some of the native tar weeds. So, it has that effect. But nothing grazes it, nothing really eats it. And that's one of the problems that we have with managing. It is going to have to be manual. It's going to have to be cultural controls. Is it actually poisonous? I think I did read that it's not so much that those oils and everything that are poisonous, even though they, they caused a dermatitis, it's the pappas on the seed has those same little barbs on them and it gets caught up in their intestines. And that causes problems for, for grazing animals. So, that's a great question. I don't think I've read anything that it's toxic to them, but I think they leave it alone. So, there might not be a lot of research on that.

Comment:

00:44:16

(inaudible)

Kevin Woolen:

00:44:17

Yeah, I read that too. So, let's put it this way. Ranchers don't have any complaint about that because the cows just don't eat it. I don't know how they tested that. But I have never saw a group of cows, you know, nibbling or even acting like they want to eat it. It's usually intact. Occasionally I'll see where it looks like a browsing animal. You can, after a while you get into to the difference between a grazing animal and an animal that browses. Deer browse, goats browse, cattle and sheep graze. There are short grazers and long grazers. And so, they wrap their tongue around and pull the grass apart. Cowboys can tell you and talk for hours about that. I won't bore you with it. But it is somewhat interesting, and it is applicable to managing the plants because you want to know what eats it, and what might eat it and what won't.

Kevin Woolen:

00:45:12

Some people have said that you could spray it with Roundup, and it sweetens the flavor of it because of sugars and this and that and maybe the cow might eat it. And I'm like, no, I don't think we want to do that. Well, you go to these range land--trust me-- range land seminars are a whole different world than what we're used to in in lands management. I don't think that that they were serious about making that a practice. But you know, that was, that was mentioned at some point. So, you see it here, you see this green down around the edge of the margins. One of the things that we did do this year, I worked with the hydrologist and we raised the level of the lake, the lake level at the right time and we're able to manage a whole lot of dittrichia by just changing the dynamic. Because that's disturbance, right? You see the waterline and you see everything below it. That's just bare soil. Invasive plants love it. If we shifted the way we manage it-- I don't have control of that. There's a lot of other factors. But it was an ask and it happened this year maybe because I asked, maybe because it was something that they had to do anyway, or you know, they were able to time it, within the time frame that I asked them for.

Kevin Woolen:

00:46:31

So here's a close-up map of the watershed using Google Earth because my skill level and my tools were limited. At first, I was able to get the points that were put in RTIS, converted to a KMZ file and upload it to this. And then I can put in lines of where it kind of grows along the roadways and where it threatens some of our infrastructure, you know, restoration sites, that type of thing. And start getting a handle on what the priorities are with this particular, where do we attack it first? Obviously so much that, with the resources we have, we can't just do it all at once. Low hanging fruit, roadsides, and BHR sites where we know we have to manage it legal requirements.

Kevin Woolen:

00:47:30

I don't even venture into the gravel quarry, that's so disturbed it's so much. And in fact, that's one of the routes of entry. Rachel Brown's, he did some research, that gravel in fact is, you know, they put gravel on all the gravel roads out there, is most likely the way it was initially introduced. And then it kind of spreads from there. Cattle, you know, again, will walk by it when it's got the seeds on it, this, those seeds readily stick to their legs. And then they're laying in all these little cool spots, that are gullies and things that they also travel a lot and disturb and it just, you can begin to really get a picture of how it spreads across the land. And we are... This is a Cal Weed Mapper, which I really recommend if you don't have an internal program.

Kevin Woolen:

00:48:18

SF PUC likes to use all their, you know, internal software. So, myself and, I invited Kristin today and I guess she couldn't make it, we're developing a weed mapping collecting APP that's on my tablet. So, when I'm out there I can just take points. There's also a lot of data associated with those points that we could begin to develop a story about the way weeds spread, how we might best control them, where they're most vulnerable, the phonology, time a year that they flower this and that. So, you can see kind of down here, the not highlighted part that there is, you know, scattered dense patches, before with just a point on Google earth you can store it, but it's not in a table. It's not easily sorted and with this, you can relate it to the raster file.

Kevin Woolen:

00:49:19

They have some terminology now--I took a few classes. So, I'm able to do a lot more with this than I was with our previous, or my previous system. So, that's a point I wanted to make with this, is I can begin to find out what habitat these different weeds grow in. I can begin to get a way better picture of what moves them. And I have a graphic on that, in a little bit, with a different weed than dittrichia but you can see the, the benefit, right? You get a lot more data, you have a lot more information at your disposal by using a mapping system like either the California Weed Map or some internal. (To an audience member) Didn't you say that you guys also built your own app for collecting map points that give you this kind of data that you can sort and you can find out, okay, how many do I have in this section of town, for instance, or this zip code or that type of thing?

Kevin Woolen:

00:50:13

So, that's what we're trying to do with this. I'm really fascinated by the fact that we can use what I talked about raster or the contours of land and where our water flows through to find out how that might move seeds or other plant propagules into our reservoir or the margins of the reservoir or onto the BHR site, for instance, or out into the grasslands where it might be introduced. And you know, why might I want to know that is because I have really limited resources that I'm monitoring and detection, right? So, if I can know better where to look, you know, and focus my efforts there, it's going to be more productive, right? When you have limited resources, you have to really think about every little movement, you know, and how he can better, better use your technology.

Kevin Woolen:

00:51:03

So, this is just another slide of kind of showing that, you know, when I click on a point, I can get information about that point. These are some rare and endangered plants in relation, and we begin to see how, what I'm talking about with some of these contours. This is Tamaracks or small flower Tamaracks, Salt Cedar, which is a really nasty, tough, invasive plant to deal with it. We don't have a lot of it, but we have enough of it and it's one of my top priorities because you want to catch it early in the evasion curve like we talked about earlier. So, you see it here and you see these bigger dots and different color dots. Those are rare and endangered plants. So, I get that story right. I also got the story of the contours. We can see that, and you know, having some knowledge of the site as well as helpful.

Kevin Woolen:

00:51:53

But there's a creek, La Costa Creek that runs down through here, through this canyon and then turns toward the reservoir, which I've got a wider angle of it here in a minute. And that shows you how it eventually made it to the reservoir and then there's prevailing winds that blow against the currents and that spreads it kind of in this sort of fan shape way. So, I know where to look for it now on the reservoir and where it's likely to go next. That's the point of all that. Same thing could be true of dittrichia or any, you know, plant you're going to manage. Pigs and birds are a lot more difficult, a lot more variables, than plants, they usually spread radially, or you know, by some animal moving them. So, here's the tamaracks and here is what I was talking about is you can see it flows down the creek into the reservoir.

Kevin Woolen:

00:52:46

This is would be a current and then the wind coming off the ocean would blow this way. So, it kind of flows in and it gets blown backwards along these areas on the bank and then establishes, and of course, you know, what do we do? That's right on the margins of our reservoir. We can't use herbicides. We're stuck with other methods. So again, we use water. So, I found out, did my research, you cut this down below the high-water mark, have a foot or more of water over the top of it for a period of 60 days. And you're going to have impact it and then we can go out and pull the smaller ones when we find those. So, it gave me an excuse to buy a boat, which is really cool, {laughs) the fun part. So anyway, and I have some, a slide that kind of shows us out there and working on this stuff.

Question:

00:53:41

[Inaudible]

Kevin Woolen:

00:53:41

Well, the watershed keeper and biologist and there's other people out there that do all the management of our water. There's is not a lot of boats out there. And if they are, rest assured it's for some activity that's important to the quality of the water. No recreational boating at all. Yeah. So, this, you know, again tells me if I just have a single plant, scattered plants, what stage of growth it is at the date it was collected, what priority we give it. That's one of the things, if it's a high priority at this point is in open water, they don't have a category. So, it's like margin. It's either open water or riparian habitats. We could add that though if we wanted to add another, you know.

Kevin Woolen:

00:54:30

And it's on the Alameda watershed. It tells who collected it, when it was collected so that we can also get a time, and begin to develop with it, not just these spatial analyses, but temporal. We can find out how long did it take it, you know, from our first observation to get to this point, right. So, we can begin to start talking and thinking in terms of how much longer do we have it for the next quarter mile or something down the watershed and what direction it's going to go and those things. It's really pretty cool. It's a lot to wrap your head around even working with our RTIS. It's the most-- I have a background with graphic software, you know, Photoshop and Illustrator and those types of things from my days as a photographer--this is way harder. It just is not intuitive. There are things that you got to know all these different file formats and everything. So, it's something, but luckily, we have a couple of experts in the department that all I have to do is kind of basically tell him what I envision and then they helped me bring that to fruition, which is awesome.

Kevin Woolen:

00:55:41

So then we, we work with this, all this information and data we're collecting and start developing these plans. So, you know, which include mapping and inventorying and site history. We're working on it now. This is the, maybe you are familiar with the, nature conservancy has a template for these weed management plans. So, what we've done is taken that as you do with a template and make it our own, adapted it to our needs for different sites. So, the BHR site might be different than a range land site or you know, we have a nursery that went out of business that's highly disturbed and you know and it's just a weed bank right now. So, we've got to develop a plan for that. So, I'm working a lot on that during those months where it's a little slower of actually doing the weed control.

Kevin Woolen:

00:56:31

So, I spend a lot of hours on out these different plants on a given site. This one was for a Rudo grass on the Arroyo de la Laguna. It's always hard to say that when fast. So, the, the Arundo grows along the banks and its impacts, flooding, fire, the, you know, the hydrology of the creek, that type of stuff. So, we worked up a plan for that. That's just the kind of the cover for it. I think there's a newer iteration that doesn't say integrative pest management site management plans, it is just is integrated pest management site plan. So, we cleaned it up a little bit. But anyway, so it's important to have the site history again, what's grown there. It's even more important to have what the goal, go ahead, Matt.

Question:

00:57:22

[Inaudible]

Kevin Woolen:

00:57:24

The arundo is going to be cut and dobbed because the root system, we can't get heavy equipment to it. Disturbance of the bank is detrimental to the neighboring properties and this and that. So we have a permit and--well, the project is actually on hold now because there's some going back and forth between San Francisco and the County and this and that about some other issues not related directly to this-- but, we'll have a crew remove the structural part of the plant and then work on the roots where we... the smaller ones will just be dug out, but there's some that have root systems are clumps that are as big around as the inside of this, right. So, that would be a little different in the disturbance that that would cause to the creek flow which could be detrimental to other stuff around there. So, go ahead.

Question:

00:58:26

[inaudible]

Kevin Woolen:

00:58:28

That's why we have a five-year plan instead of a one-year plan. It's not going to be a onetime deal. We know that. The hope is that we get what we get. There's going to be some small flushes of growth that we'll be able to tackle when it's this tall. Not when it's 20 something feet tall. Yeah, we know that, but again, we don't feel like that we could do that in this environment. So, we're, we're tackling it on a scale that's not, you know, there's like an immediate [inaudible] would drift and this and that. So, you have all that was thought through it. And I agree, because there's other places where arundo is that that doesn't it impact. This doesn't flow into our water system. This actually flows into, or it would flow into another creek and then ultimately into those holding areas along the bay. So, we have to be careful about what we do there and timing. You can't be near the time of the creek flowing and that type of stuff. So yeah, there's a lot that goes into it. That's why we make these plans and that's why it gets vetted through our. . .

Kevin Woolen:

00:59:43

. . .we talked about it earlier, our regulatory staff. Yeah. So, does all that's been discussed and when we come up with these plans, there is a lot of, again, surveying that goes on. A lot of research that goes on that tells us, nope, not worth the, you know, the possible downside or, yes, it is. So, adaptive and that's what we might have to adjust our control method over that five-year period. So, you need to have a mechanism to review annually and a change the plan if needs be and monitoring the site. And that's a big part of all invasive plant management. We've got to know, you know, is it working, what we're doing, is the density getting less that type of those types of things. And then, it's got to be team oriented. You know, we again have experts on staff with botanists. I'm blessed in that way. I mean, a lot of experts, a lot of support that, you know, you don't always have the luxury of when working with the PUC.

Kevin Woolen:

01:00:58

Okay. Treatment of free field trials for dittrichia, back to that. So, this ism when I first got there limited, tools to work with and a limited time because of the dittrichia was already in it's, just a short time away from it's flowering time and after it flowers, pretty much set seed and game over for that year, right? So, I tried burn down, this is Ax, right? And this is untreated. 24 hours is all it takes. Boom. And an annual plant once it sets those buds, that energy from the roots that wants to have it grow, right? Which is what it's, you know, doing all summer long is, subdued anyway. So, the chance of recovery is not that good. You could not use Ax in this way or burned down in this way two or three weeks earlier than this because the plant would recover and a would produce seed again. It wouldn't be as much, you know, definitely going to impact production of seed, but it's not going to kill it like it did here.

Kevin Woolen:

01:02:08

And I found that out in subsequent uses of it in the next season. But the good news is, this is the same site two days ago. Okay. So, you can manage it, right? Like we talked about, we know that it's got a short leave seed bank, all that back there. That's green. That's dittrichia Okay. It went all the way from the road all the way out into this big flat and then you can see it up going up the hill sides to no more up the hillsides. This was all hand pulled. All handwork up there. A lot of weed eater work and mowers. We did, we did different things trying to see what's going work for us on with this particular one. The burn down, what works well, close to a flower, you know, just after bud set, right, right before flowering and maybe just after the flower sets on there. Because it's instant, but it's not going to produce seed. If you were to try to use a systemic herbicide at this point, it would go ahead and flower and produce seed. The seed, all the seed might not be viable. It might not be as much production, but it would still produce seed.

Kevin Woolen:

01:03:13

So, this is some information from several different trials sort of, compiled into one slide. So, what we found out about Milestone, using a buffer penetrant as an agilent is that at five ounces per acre--we didn't do acreage with it at this point. We're just trying to see what worked and what didn't. It would be a rate of 20 gallons per acre. It's prescribed-- A timing would be a rosette to early bolt stage March through June 15th, would be the time to use Milestone on this particular weed. And we discovered that it got to 60% control. And that was mostly because it impacted seed production and seed viability. It didn't really kill the plant. Okay. So, and all you guys know that that's what people want to see, but it's possible maybe to--and the reason why I had this idea about controlling seed was because that the trial Detomaso and Kaiser did with Medusahead found out that Milestone may impact seed production. So, which makes sense, because it's basically a growth regulator. It also learned it from Gulf, right? Use TrimNet or whatever, that sort of controls seed. It's a growth regulator. So, it's the same idea. Okay. Roundup Custom, I found out, that you can drastically reduce the dose if you add a buffer penetrant. So, what that does is, particularly the case of dittrichia is that it's got this resinous oily layer on it that I think herbicide and an oil, probably wouldn't penetrate very well.

Kevin Woolen:

01:05:02

So, using the buffer penetrate, which is essentially orange oil and garlic extract of some sort. So, it's basically a burned down, but it's marketed as an agivent, not as another herbicide. So, it's not a tank mix per se, of two active ingredients. It is, an agivent in an active ingredient. So, dropping it down to a really low percentage rate is fine because while we're trying to do is, burn that cuticle off and that that plant loses its superpower for the summer. That's what's holding all that water and moisture in the plant. That's what enables that plant to live through these dry summers that we have. Burn that off of it, the plant doesn't function very well. It might recover for a little bit, maybe recover enough to set some seed, but you add this little bit of a systemic herbicide to it that stops that recovery process.

Kevin Woolen:

01:05:57

Yeah. Why even do it, right?

Question:

01:05:59

[Inaudible]

Kevin Woolen:

01:05:59

Sure. Well, we will be getting to that. We definitely tried an Avenger, like I said, and Ax as well. And the problem with those is, it is an effective control, but you have to-- so you begin to see that the phonology plays a role, right? So after, you might be able to get some control using milestone. And the reason why we do that is because maybe there's some grasses, native grass or something that we don't want to impact--that the Roundup might impact. So, these windows of opportunity, based on the phonology of the plant is what we're looking at here, with what we've learned, right? So, the burn downs work great late in the season you can burn that cuticle off, burn that plant material up and it doesn't have the energy to recover. Earlier in the, in the middle part of that season when it's really starting to put all that stuff's being trans-located up the root to mask the plant, it will recover.

Kevin Woolen:

01:06:57

Another point worth noting on this slide is that a lot of folks that use, you know, chemical herbicides, that are systemic, are either burned down, you know, these really quick acting and very effective thing. This botanical and soap, burn down products, you can't apply them like you apply Roundup. It's not this little trace amount on the material. You know, you have to spray the plant, basically drench the plant with it because there's nothing that's traveling through the plant material. It's just contact-- whatever contacts it kills. That's it. Again, why would we bother with something like Tamaracks or stinkwort? It's, fire and flood, in erosion., It causes different problems on the land. So that's why we do it. It impacts forage for the cattle.

Kevin Woolen:

01:07:55

Okay. So IPM practitioners in action. So, we've got my favorite, little buddy here, he's a ravenous rodent eater as are all those raptors. But here's a picture of, I've got a couple of great seasonal workers and you know, this was a, a mud a slid, years ago. So, disturbance and there is our artichoke thistle, a big stand of it. So, we had to go and treat that. Some of it was on, on the steep incline. And again, we wanted to get right down on top of the plant, not just kind of try to treat it from above and you know, get messy with our application. We wanted it to be direct where we could, we just dug out the tap roots and done, right. That's what this old battle axe is for and his Polaski. That was supposed to be my joke. I'm the battle axe. Okay.

Kevin Woolen:

01:08:51

Okay. So anyway, we could dig the ones out on the ground, but for, for human health and safety reasons that wasn't really possible here. And also, you know, it's a slide so you don't want to go disturb on the slide erosion, all kinds of other problems that go with that, right? So, we basically tied the rope off to this, rig here and Nick went down the hillside and took up those things out by cutting and giving them a quick application, a daub type application. And this is the tamaraks we were talking about. So, we're on the boat and cutting that down below the high-water line. And you can see it's at the high-water mark instead of down really low. So, it was an, it was an opportunity. Plants are opportunistic and IPM professionals need to be just as opportunistic.

Kevin Woolen:

01:09:39

When we find a choke point or a point which we could use naturally occurring events to control these weeds out there. That's what we shoot for. You know, when it involves health and safety, you know, sometimes scale than we might have to resort to other means, but mostly this is what we do. You know, we put up raptor perches up around those little stock pond dams that you see and that was based on some research from UC Davis, as to placement because that's really important. You can't just plop one out there. It has to be where prevailing winds will let that raptor kind of jump off the perch and hover while it goes down to the, you know, goes down and pick up the rodent. So that's kind of it. I'm open for questions after that. Just wanted to share some stuff that we've learned. Tell you a little bit about the watershed. That's the second one out of all the photos, that's another, not mine. He had like $10,000 camera equipment to get those photos. Okay. So, any questions about any of this or any thing that anybody else wants to share that they've learned about it?

Question:

01:11:10

Okay. So, in the dittrichia treatment table you mentioned potentially replacing glyphosate with glyphosinate. I was curious if you've tried that and had any success.

Kevin Woolen:

01:11:21

No. That's on the, on the list of things to try because we feel like it's a systemic and often down the list, down the roll on the tier system. And, so that's on, on our schedule for next year. For some trials we may be able to go that route. Uh, I think that that will work. It doesn't really take much to go ahead and kind of put it over the edge or keep it from recovering, but it takes something. That's what we know about it in that pure growth period. And there's so much of it that we have to have that entire span of its life cycle to kind of manage it, right. So, these little--have to shift from one type of treatment to in the next based on location and time of the year. But thank you for pointing that out. I wanted to mention that. Anything else? Other questions? Okay.

Question:

01:12:18

Did you ever try half a percent Roundup without bio link?

Kevin Woolen:

01:12:23

Yeah, we have. In fact, Don Thomas did some research on that or did some trials on that and found out that that did work. It's going to be slower, but yeah, I think he tried it on invading--where some coyote brush was invading grasslands if I'm not mistaken, but he did some tests on that. And it is true. I think there's a couple of things that are really important here. And another thing I didn't mention is nozzle selection is important. We all buy these solo backpacks with the adjustable cone nozzle that can shoot across the room or be made into this hollow cone. But what we're supposed to be doing is going by and treating this plant. Well, a hollow cone is probably not the best selection for nozzle for that type of treatment.

Kevin Woolen:

01:13:20

A solid cone is the best. And if you try to, okay, I want to just hit it with that jet, you know, tighten up that thing. So, it's, you don't have that hollow effect, then you're using a jet that just kind of bounces off the plant. And that isn't very effective either. So, Solo sells a nozzle, T Jet sells a nozzle that has a solid cone nozzle. I've found those to be very effective. It's kind of like, you know, you get a very thorough coverage and when you are using something like Burn Down, that's really important. So that, that's one thing, that little pressure gauge that's inside of your, your backpack sprayer. It's really important to know about that and how that relates to your nozzle and potential drift. And I've given, I used to give some classes on that at Rec Park because I, that was one of the ways that you can also reduce use, because those other nozzles kind of--it's a lot of flow that you don't need and winds up being another way to drop that percentage down.

Kevin Woolen:

01:14:18

So, when you use that nozzle, the right pressure and that lower percentage and get better, more thorough coverage on a plant, you can definitely control it and you can use a lot lower percent of whatever active ingredient it.

Comment:

01:14:33

Yeah, it's awesome. I'm surprised half a percent works so well, that's great.

Kevin Woolen:

01:14:37

It does on this plant with that you know, with that buffer penetrate. So, but I've found too, I mean, everybody's kind of seems to be locked into 2% or something, right. With glyphosate-- 1% definitely is fine for most things. Mostly what we're controlling is annual weed. You get into some of these heavier, you know, tamaracks or something like that, that's a beefy root system and a well-established woody plant. Yeah. We've got change that thinking. But for most, most things that we deal with that are these herbacious annual or short-lived perennial plants, you could definitely drop the percentage. Yeah. And I would make that a policy. Anything else? Not yet. But that's something that's on my radar and I've definitely sent up to our regulatory staff because it's on our back door of country as they call it, toward Don Pedro, in that area. It's maybe within 50 miles, which is definitely the range of that animal.

Question:

01:15:55

I just had a question about cutting and leaving it in place. What's the latest in its stage, do you think you could cut and leave it in place?

Kevin Woolen:

01:16:03

I'm glad you asked that question? I kind of get through these things--so for manual, we do a lot, a ton of manual removal with this weed. So, there's a point where, a couple of weeks, because we know that about that phonology of daily dependency. So, it might appear to put on a flower and maybe even a few seeds, but they're not going to be viable. If two weeks before that period, you get them, you put them in a pile and another precaution you could do is just tarp them, you know, in place, right? So, I know there's also some research that suggest that you, that it will produce seed and that might be true, but viable seed is a whole, another story, right? So, we've tested a couple, we'd done it a couple of seed viability test using different methods. And there's a threshold that the plant won't produce viable seed when it's pulled him and piled in place. We wind up bagging it. I don't know if that's the best method either when it's getting closer to seed production, where it will produce viable seed or tarping it and just come back and removing the tarp. Is that helpful?

Comment:

01:17:19

But there are some spots along in San Mateo County along, Pinoir Road coming over 92 that we've been, we did some cutting and left it in place just because it was, with the cars going by and everything, it was too hard. You couldn't tarp it or collected it at all, right. It was just starting to flower so I thought we were okay with leaving it in place at that point.

Kevin Woolen:

01:17:42

Well, if it's starting to flower, it will probably produce viable seed. Two weeks before that, which is two weeks before the first day of fall it doesn't, yeah, because the plants phonology is dependent on that shift from shorter days to longer nights.

Comment:

01:17:58

Okay. Thank you.

Kevin Woolen:

01:18:05

You finally got tired of hearing me talk.

Chris Geiger:

01:18:10

Okay. Well, thank you. (Applause) It's too bad we can't take the whole group out there cause it's so gorgeous. Okay. We've reached that part of our day when we, when we kind of throw the doors open, if anyone has any questions they want to ask the group or Kevin or you know, anyone in the room or problems that you have, you'd like advice on now's your chance. So, usually when I asked this, there's about a 15 second silence and then someone finally raises their hand. So, I'll say it right now the clock is ticking. Any questions for the group? Six, seven, eight. Wow. Okay. Not a single one this time. Okay. Well, I do want to remind you about Cheryl Willan next month. That's going to be a great session also. And she was very anxious to come up and share her findings. And I know Salvador, you know, MTA is using the foam stream. I'm curious, did you guys have any results with Rec Park on the foam stream machine?

Comment:

01:19:40

We tried it on artificial turf, the seam on the walkway and where the artificial turf meets, and we seem to have burned down a lot of the shallow rooted weeds. But I think you have to follow up, like any kind of weeding, yeah.

Chris Geiger:

01:20:04

So, it didn't sink in deeply enough to get the roots. What kind of grass?

Comment:

01:20:13

Annual bluegrass that grew up in the crevasse, but we're going to see. We may trial it for a few months to get a better idea. It's just a one time shot that we've seen it in action, so.

Chris Geiger:

01:20:23

Oh Great. Are you all familiar with the foam stream machine? It's, it's a hot water and foam and it's organic, whatever they use to make the foam, it's organically certified as made from plant materials. It's an awful lot like the white poona machine, if you ever, remember that. We tried it here at Rec Park years ago. Bob was around probably. Bob, you were white poona trials, right?

Bob:

01:20:58

Oh totally. Yeah. What about it?

Chris Geiger:

01:21:01

Well, because we are comparing it with a foam stream, there's a foam stream thing.

Bob:

01:21:04

Oh yeah. So, we're looking at another hot foam? When? Are you getting equipment?

Chris Geiger:

01:21:07

Well, we just tried it.

Bob:

01:21:14

How about a flea trial?

Chris Geiger:

01:21:17

Flea?

Bob:

01:21:17

Yeah, we're trying to kill fleas that are, we have a huge flea problem that's derived from a coyote den and the hot foam might be worth treating the top of the soil if you're getting it soon. Yeah, the hot foam was for weed control was definitely a better application than hot water. Hot Water was a lot of water and you know, it worked to some extent, but the hot foam really does concentrate the heat long enough where you put it you use a lot less water. The only problem that we found when doing trials with it was to make sure that there were no pets around because the hot foam at that time was being made from sugar. It was like cotton candy. And, it was a little bit attractive to animals and it stayed hot. So, like you imagine a dog's nose, the heat would stay for some time, but that's why it worked well. The hot water was really great for tree spraying, more than anything, better than for weed control, I thought. Yeah to wash trees with the white poonos system, like for scale, mealy bug aphids, for street trees, you know, you could wash the trees, get all the bugs off all of the city mold and stuff, and then while you're there you wash the sidewalks and you know, you could really kind of disinfect an area really well.

Bob:

01:22:55

And that's where, you know, it seemed to make more sense to use copious amounts of water versus trying to do some weed control with, you know, going out--we were running out to fire hydrant and filling up the tank and, but the hot foam, did have some, some real effectiveness and application. But I would like to try it on fleas. So, maybe it's a one-time thing and we may never need to do that again.

Chris Geiger:

01:23:21

I seem to remember this is like right about when I came on, when those trials were happening. Or, just before, just before I came on. Yeah. And I remember, I think Steve Ash saying, that the biggest problem was you needed a crew of two people, and it was kind of clunky to haul that stuff around.

Comment:

01:23:39

{Inaudible section - crosstalk]

Chris Geiger:

01:24:39

We might hear more about it from Cheryl. I'm not sure if this is part of her talk or not. So, I know she's talking about the steamers, some of the new newer steamers next month.

Comment:

01:24:50

Different ways of doing it and the advantage of the hot foam versus the open flame in our planning and stuff, yeah, the safety is pretty good. And you can really draw a line on this thing. It's great for edging along the fence lines and all these other things. But I'd love to see it again.

Chris Geiger:

01:25:12

Well, one thing I noticed when we were doing it with Salvador is there also isn't that much foam. I'm sure it's a different formula.

Comment:

01:25:24

The original was like, you know, it was like a bubble bath and it was like four to six inches of foam on the ground. So, one of the original pictures that were using was from Davis where they did some trials and it was in a playground setting. And like kids who were like picking up the foam and you know, it takes probably 10 minutes for the heat to kind of dissipate and then, yeah, you can play in this stuff. It was a sugar base and it was kind of interesting because you know, if you did play with that, you'd like, get sticking hands, maybe this is something else.

Chris Geiger:

01:25:58

Probably is. I mean when they were doing it on the pavers, I know it was like, it wasn't even solid foam on the pavers, right. Salvador was like spread out. Maybe we can bring some photos for next month. I have, a few photos I can bring. I mean it build up, the foam built up when they did it on the weeds, so the water is sinking in and on the trial, I also noticed he was standing there for like a minute on one weed. Not on the other ones, but just on one trial.

Comment:

01:26:39

I thought the idea was that you could you could get the foam on it and you can walk away and, it's like hot shaving cream. That's sort of the idea. And so, you still have to stand there for a long time then that's not so good.

Chris Geiger:

01:26:59

We will see. We, they tried it on some pompous grass. What else was it? Fennel. It might've been the fennel when he was standing there. Okay. Any other, I'm still getting used to this microphone.

Comment:

01:27:29

Just a question to the group about Cape Ivy. Is anybody, if you're hand pulling that? I mean, any ideas of can it go directly to the dump and we don't have to worry about regrowth or is that an issue? I mean, just if anyone has any ideas. It's our dump.

Response:

01:27:48

I mean, you're probably better off tarping it long term and in a pile that you can control that's separate from everything else because it's really likes to regrow from any node.

Question:

01:28:07

[Inaudible]

Response:

01:28:29

Oh, so it's like the municipal dump? Yeah. Oh, I don't know. You'd have to ask them. But I mean, it does fine in like compost, but I don't know. I think it would eat, it would just like grow in the dump probably. You should, try to budget as much time as you can to go back, like once month. That's kind of the only place I've seen success on it is if, you know, especially with hand removal is if you have like, with the conservancy, we've had a lot of success with people just walking in a line, like within arm's reach once a month and you'll find stuff almost every time and then they'll actually have success. But then there's also patches that I've been spraying for five years, once a year. You know, like if you don't go back and follow up on it.

Chris Geiger:

01:29:40

So you're, you're just handling no spraying. Yeah, it kind of depends a lot on what the practices are in that landfill too and what daily cover they're putting on it and how big of a volume and so forth. So, any other questions for the group? I think we are almost out of time now. Okay. Thank you again for joining us. Maybe give another round of applause to Kevin. [Applause]

Chris Geiger:

01:30:10

We will wait for your boat trip.

END VIDEO:

01:30:15

END VIDEO