This last Sunday was our June Sunday work day as well as our work day during the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Invasive Species Action Week (CISAW).  We were even pictured in their blog about CISAW.

We sure did go after invasive species last Sunday.  We happily had a small group so I was able to have them work in our experimental plot the ‘Green Rectangle’.  We picked every invasive species we ran into including wild radish (Raphanus sativus), all ice plant species, tocalote (Centaurea melitensis), Russian thistle (Salsola tragus), and anything else that isn’t supposed to be there.  I had visited the plot earlier in the week and had taken pictures so I was able to get before and after photos of the area.  Even with our fine toothed weeding between the natives you can definitely see the improvement!  While weeding we kept finding small poppies blooming, native grass that had sprouted from seeds and our planted native grass hiding among the weeds.  Considering this drought and the little extra water this area gets when we irrigate, finding these natives still alive is wonderful news!

We even saw a 3 foot San Diego gopher snake (Pituophis catenifer annectens) and a very loud Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) flew overhead.

~Erin