What is your favorite condiment for a Memorial Day brat? My childhood friend, with family roots in Wisconsin, told me there is only one choice.... mustard! And mustard flowers certainly have painted the landscape the intermountain region this year. Yellow flowers of all shades blooming in pastures, rangelands and hayfields are making their presence felt!

Photo One:A few tumble mustard plants in the foreground, with a monoculture of flixweed in dryland pasture in the background.

Over the past six springs, I've lived in northeast California winter annual mustards grow consistently with some years being worse than others. Alfalfa fields often are infested with shepard's purse, flixweed, and tumble mustard. Dryland...

In January I visited a small property to help identify various plants that had taken over an acre of unirrigated land. The property owner wanted to know how to manage the weeds, and if horses could safely graze them. Among some residual annual grasses, there was a surprising amount of mallow, already forming enormous mounds of leaves and stems.

Since January, mallow - little mallow (Malva parviflora; pictured above), and/or common mallow (M. neglecta) - continues to show up, not only in small pastures and rangelands, but also along roads and in urban areas in Fresno County. In my 5 years in the region, I have never noticed mallow dominating quite as much as I've seen it this year. It seems that our...

A new invader was found in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta (hereafter “Delta”) by California State Parks, Division of Boating and Waterways (“CDBW”). The new weed is Australian ribbonweed, Vallisneria australis S.W.L. Jacobs and Les. First described as V. gigantea, the taxonomic name has been revised to V. australis (see photos). It has multiple common names, including ribbonweed, eel grass, and others. Native to Australia, it has been spread to New Zealand, Europe, and North America. Ribbonweed is widely sold in both aquatic gardening and aquarium trades.

Ribbonweed forms fertile seed pods, but the predominant form of spread is vegetative by stolon fragments. It forms...

I have called California Home for the past 6 years since starting this position and the past two summers are unlike any I have experienced in the west. Growing up in Colorado I remember the smokey skys from the Hayman fire and ash raining down from the High Park fire, which blackened my grandparents' property. Moving to Susanville, we had smoke and ash from the 2016 Willard fire, the 2018 Whaleback fire and the 2019 Walker fire, but none of it was unlike what I was used to back home.

Raining ash and thick air was a novel experience to many of my new friends in Susanville, who had grown up in the Midwest. Where friends I had made who were local said 2016-2019 “was nothing” compared to the 65,000 acre Moonlight fire,...