Dallas McCormack, Newcastle Weed Crew, 1st summer:

Today we have just been spraying noxious weeds in the the Solhoult area and we’ve been going up through some trails and spraying each side of the road, making sure all of the noxious weeds are gone.

Most of the time we spray from our truck with a handheld and occasionally we will take backpacks and spray mines and areas we can’t reach with our trucks, but on our trucks we can reel out 200 feet, I believe.

It just depends on how weedy spots are, but we can probably cover 5 – 8 miles from our truck each day. On a really weedy day, so to say, we can probably only cover a 1/4 to 1/8 mile.

I would have to say just working with the different people every week. I mean you get assigned a new person to work with every week and you get to know new people and just a fun experience to be able to work outside and be out in the sun.

Eugene Bolka, Range Technician, Mystic RD:

Well today it was more dedicated towards the biological control measures and which we have the biological control bugs for the Canada thistle which is called the Ceutorhynchus litura. It’s a stem-mining weevil and basically what it does is it lays its eggs in the stem and then the larvae burrow down into through the stem and into the root system and which of course kills the plant.

We try to treat areas that are really difficult to get at with a regular spray truck or UTV or something like that and we also try to concentrate on public contacts to make them aware that right next to their private land that we do have biological control to help kind of contain the Canada thistle.

Usually the bugs will work really really good in the wet weather.

We got 24 releases, what they call a release. Each release had 420 bugs in it and each release is kind of accountable for 5 acres.

It's a long process. It's not going to happen overnight, but you can tell the next year definitely the difference, but it's usually a 3-5 year process.

The biggest thing is to treat them, don’t let them go cause it will take over your property and of course other properties.