As the summer heats up, so too does our summer field crew! After pulling nearly 4000 pounds of Garlic Mustard and surveying roughly 100 mi of Great Lakes shoreline European Frogbit and Himalayan Balsam management has begun.
European Frogbit is a detrimental aquatic plant that is free floating in stagnant water. It has small dime sized, heart shaped leaves and small white flowers. A visit to Munuscong Dike in May with the Pickford 6th grade class proved that it’ll be a great summer for Frogbit management as it had already started popping up.
Himalayan Balsam is just now starting to come up as well. Himalayan Balsam is managed due to the destructive effect of the plant in sloped riparian areas. Since the roots of Himalayan Balsam are roughly 2-3 inches in length, when they die in the winter, the root structure holds no sediment in place causing large erosion events in the spring when winter runoff flows down to riparian corridors. This invasive can grow 3-4 feet in height with whorled leaves at the top of the plant and opposite leaves going down the stem. It has a reddish hue at the base of the stem with spear shaped, toothed leaves. The flowers are irregular and are commonly compared to constable caps, coming in pink, magenta, and occasionally white.
If you see this pop up in your yard at all you can give us a call or try to catch us at the Sault Ste. Marie Farmer’s Market on June 26, July 24, and August 21 for our Trade up days. There we will have a blue CISMA bag filled with a couple black contractor bags to put your Himalayan Balsam into, a spade for digging, gloves, and some native seeds to spread where you pulled! Additionally, if you have any questions, concerns, or general observations, you can now visit our outreach specialist Lillian LaCross at the Les Cheneaux Community Library on June 27, July 25, and August 22 where she’ll be from 1-4pm. You can also visit us at Engineer’s Day on June 28th where we will have a booth with some fun giveaways.
For the month of July you can catch us at either the Drummond Island Marine or Hessel Boat Launch July 1-3 for our Aquatic Invasive Species(AIS) outreach events. We will also be at Frogfest on July 13 and the Alberta House doing sunprints on July 30. If you want to get your hands dirty, look out for our community pull events where we will pull European Frogbit, Spotted Knapweed or Purple Loosestrife. You can keep up to date on weekly events by following our Facebook and Instagram pages, @threeshorescisma, and as always feel free to give a call if you need some advice or invasive species help at (906)630-7189.
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