Pesky Weeds Get Mowed Down to Size

The tumblin’ tumbleweeds of Western song and lore, now becoming suburban pests, met the machine age Thursday.

It was Machines 1, Weeds 0.

As about three dozen county officials and area residents looked on with delight, a pair of large tractor-borne mowers plowed through one of the toughest tumbleweed fields the Antelope Valley had to offer, converting the pesky plants into desert mulch.

That proved the mowers are up to the task of battling the weeds, eliminating the need for a controversial county proposal to set fire to 2,700 tumbleweed-infested acres around Lancaster and Palmdale.

“This looks good right here,” said Cato Fiksdal, a deputy director in the Los Angeles County agricultural commissioner’s office, pointing to where the mowers had ground a dense swath of four-foot-tall tumbleweeds into a thin layer of comparatively harmless twigs.

Tumbleweeds--formally known as Russian thistle--flourish in arid Western areas, eventually becoming large, wind-catching balls six feet or more high that break loose from their roots and roll for miles. They bounce along highways, startling drivers, and gather in highly flammable piles against houses and other structures.

County officials said they proposed their unprecedented plan for widespread controlled burning of the tumbleweeds last month after being told the weeds were too big and tough to be mowed. But Thursday’s test in a remote area east of Lancaster went off without a hitch.

The county’s turnabout was good news to the area’s farmers and business leaders. Although the Antelope Valley’s tumbleweed growth is one of the worst in memory this year, residents had warned that burning them would leave bare soil that would worsen the area’s already serious problems with blowing sand.

“If we compare the tumbleweeds to the dust, most of us would prefer to have the tumbleweeds,” said Jim Bort, a top Los Angeles City Department of Airports official at the city’s small airport in Palmdale.

The layer of ground-up tumbleweeds, in contrast, should help keep the soil in place, he said.

The County Board of Supervisors is still expected next month to declare the 2,700 acres of tumbleweeds a public nuisance and order them removed. But if the landowners do not do it themselves, the county now would mow the weeds and charge the owners, instead of burning the plants, Fiksdal said.

Mowing will also probably prove more economical. County officials had said the burning would cost landowners $100 to $150 an acre. But H & H Enterprises, the San Bernardino County company that provided the two tractors Thursday, estimated mowing would cost only about $40 an acre.