GREAT FALLS — As summer season is underway, volunteers got a head start in getting Wadsworth Park ready for those who look to head out for the next few months.
As a part of their efforts, volunteers from Vision Net alongside the Sun River Watershed Group spent half their day picking up trash and pulling leafy spurge.
Known to be a noxious plant, leafy spurge chokes out other plants around it by shading and taking up their water supply. They are known to invade pastures, grasslands, prairies and roadsides.
Tracy Wendt, Director of the Sun River Watershed Group explained how this project came about.
"The Sun River Watershed Group was contacted by the folks at Vision Net. They were looking at doing a community day of giving for their employees, and I thought, 'let's go out to Wadsworth Pond' and see what needs to be done out there."
Wendt added that there wasn't a lot of trash, fortunately. Most of the time was spent pulling leafy spurge scattered across pond.
"Leafy spurge is a noxious weed in Montana that tends to take over the landscape and create a monoculture. It also has less nutritional value than the native plants and tends to crowd them out. We are starting a spurge control initiative and get groups of volunteers to work on it until we get it under control.
Gary Evans, Interim CEO of Vision Net, explained the importance this serves to his team. While important from a company perspective, he says promoting this sort of service is how people can better their communities.
"We've worked on an internal initiative within the company to increase the amount of both efforts and funds that we're pushing out into these communities that we live in and work in, and also our clients. "We do other things such as river cleanups. We did this lake clean up and pulling weeds just to give back to the communities because it's important to us."
The first event of the summer, with many more to come. The Sun River Watershed Group is continuing their 30-year effort in restoring and protecting the environment.
Wendt said, "in multiple ways, Wadsworth Pond is fed by the Sun River. We also have a list of strategic values and natural resource concerns that are important to the Sun River Watershed, and that includes controlling and controlling weeds. Each summer we participate in several weed control events. Now, this is kind of the start of our smaller weed control events around town.
The Sun River Watershed will host its 25th Annual Sun Canyon Weed Whacker Rodeo on Saturday, July 8th at 8:30am.
To learn more about the Sun River Watershed Group click here: https://www.sunriverwatershed.org/
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