- Posted by: Gale Perez
From the Pest in the Urban Landscape blog • June 6, 2018
When people think of parasites, often what comes to mind are blood-sucking insects like bed bugs, head lice, and fleas or other bodily invaders on or in humans and other animals. But plants can have parasites too. Most of us are familiar with mistletoe but there is another parasitic plant you may not have heard about:...
- Author: Thomas Getts
Recently I was a participant on an educational noxious weed tour in Sierra Valley. It is a beautiful mountain valley where most agricultural production is devoted to grazing and hay production. The tour was set up by the Plumas Weeds group, to show land managers and ranchers various noxious weeds which are invading Sierra Valley. We discussed identification, biology, and control options for a variety of weed species. One of the questions which was inevitably brought up for each species was: “How long is the soil seed life of this weed?” This question led to interesting conversations.
When we stopped to look at hoary cress (Lepidium Draba) we had a relatively optimistic conversation. Hoary cress is a B list...
- Author: Guy B Kyser
The Economist reports that Hungarian biologists have trained rabbits to preferentially eat common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), an invasive plant (and a native to North America).
- Author: Guy B Kyser
Saw a nice article about a gall fly soon to be released for control of Cape ivy. Our old friend Baldo from CDFA started work on this in 2001, so it's been a while coming. Cape ivy is our version of kudzu, at least along the coast.
- Author: Joseph DiTomaso
Through Sustainable Conservation and the California Horticultural Invasives Prevention (Cal-HIP) committee, the PlantRight campaign was founded in 2005. PlantRight has brought together leaders from the nursery industry, environmental groups, and academics. Its goal is to address the ongoing sale of invasive garden plants in California and to develop a strategy to remove these plants from retail sale, as well as to prevent new potentially invasive plants from being introduced. To accomplish this first objective, PlantRight teamed with the UC Master Gardener program in 2011 to survey over 225 retail nurseries throughout the state for 19 known invasive species originating from the industry. The...