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News you can use
Kamree Oliver, 10, jumps on her shovel as she digs around a burdock plant Monday morning during Sunnyside Intermediate School's Burdock Dig. The dig is an annual event that has fifth-graders from Sunnyside helping the Hill County Weed District remove weeds like burdock and houndstongue from Beaver Creek Park. While the students are never able to remove all the weeds in the area they are sent to, the effort is done so that the amount of seeds, each plant can produce up to 60,000, is lessened for livestock when they graze in the park.
Kylee Tyler, 11, holds a shovel as other students dig around a burdock plant Monday morning during Sunnyside Intermediate School's Burdock Dig.
Havre elementary students were once again in Beaver Creek Park Monday helping control a major problem-weed.
The Burdock Dig is an annual event since 1994 that has fifth-graders from Sunnyside helping the Hill County Weed District remove weeds like burdock and houndstongue from Beaver Creek Park. This year saw 65 students and 23 adults helping pull weeds.
While one may think that getting fifth-graders to dig up weeds would be hard, that tends to not be the case with some classes, like the 2004 class, pulling more than 9,000 plants in a single day, Terry Turner, Hill County Weed District supervisor said.
An individual burdock plant in Beaver Creek Park can produce up to 60,000 burrs, so when students are able to remove on average 30,000 plants from the park during the year, they are stopping the production of around 2 billion burrs, Turner said. This is important because those burrs can be detrimental to livestock by causing blindness when the burrs get into the eyes of the animals grazing the park in fall.
It also prevents the growth of more burdocks.
The fifth-graders have been targeting the same location in the park for six years.
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