One *%^$ tough weed needs some *%^$ tough weed warriors
Carl Bell
My most recent blog on December 31, 2013 was about onionweed (Asphodelus fistulosus). It included the picture below of a heavily infested site in San Diego County; which was also the place I did much of the field research discussed in the blog post.
I went out to this site the day before I posted the blog and was very surprised to see only a couple of onionweed plants there. The site is owned by a conservancy; the Center for Natural Lands Management (CNLM). So I contacted the preserve managers that have taken care of that site to see what they had been doing. Turns out that based upon my field research they had been applying chlorsulfuron (Telar, DuPont Co) for onionweed control annually since 2010. They were winning the battle, but the war is not over yet; there are still plants emerging from seed. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to completely exhaust the seedbank of this weed under real-world conditions. On another of their properties they had been treating annually since 2007 and were still seeing a few plants each winter.
They are determined to stay on top of this situation, which is what it takes to overcome a weed like onionweed. So I tip my hat to Markus Spiegelberg, Sarah Godfrey, Patrick McConnell and Jessie Vinje (formerly with CNLM, now with the Conservation Biology Institute) for being *%^$ tough weed warriors.