First CI Day!

Yesterday was my first CI Day (community impact day) with UWP. We were working with the Coalition for the Upper South Platte(CUSP) to help restore the forest after the biggest fire in CO's history. The Hayman fire of 2002 burned 138,000 acres of land, and CUSP is trying to restore the forest to its original state. There were three worksites, one spreading seeds of wildflowers and indigenous grasses, one planting baby pine trees, and one pulling weeds.
I was in the group pulling weeds, and this was no normal weed, it is the Russian knapweed,
Centaurea repens
grows to 3 ft tall
flowers are pink to lavender, solitary and turn straw colored in the fall
stems are covered in a soft gray knap
deep creeping roots are hard to control
stands can live 75 years
very poisonous to horses and kills other plants

This weed is poisonous to all other plants, and once it has been in an area the soil becomes sterile because of the poison it leeches into the soil. It is also very irritating, if it touches your skin you get a rash, and if you touch your eyes after having touched the knapweed your eyes will swell shut. It is on Colorado's list of noxious weeds, and is a native of Russia, coming into the US in the late 1800's. Only the Southeastern US is free of this weed.

For obvious reasons we needed to pull all of this weed from the land, which was already devastated by the fire, so we spent all morning pulling the weed, and stuffing it into bags to be burned (apparently if you don't burn it, it will just come back stronger, and it will only burn after 1200 degrees F). We pulled all of the weeds from the property and still had time left, so I went to help the tree planters. In four hours we (cast B 08) seeded 1 acre of land with native plants, planted over 100 trees, and rid the area of the Russian Knapweed. This was an awesome first CI day, and I can't wait for the next one!