Time to get rid of invasive plant species

The winter is gone and its taken its cleansing rain showers with it.

Those showers are also vital to nourishing local plant life, and they’ve done their job well.

Unfortunately, they didn’t just fall on our natural species of plant life, they fed the invasive species too.

And now with spring here and summer right around the corner, those invasive species, like red bromegrass and dessert broom, are starting to dry out and create fire hazards around homes.

“Around this time of year it starts to get cured; it starts to get dried out. It becomes extremely quick moving flash fuel for our fires that we have here in the northern Sonoran desert,” Scottsdale Police Captain Steve Hunter said.

“What we’re looking at right now is a pretty extensive crop of globe chamomile, a pretty extensive crop of red bromegrass ... all they need is a solid ignition source to start up and the next thing you know because these fuels are so flashy and so quick burning, they’ll burn quickly but then they will get into what we call our ladder fuels which are our bigger fuels like our creosotes or our palo verdes or mesquites and the next thing you know we have a significant wildland fire.”

The best thing you can do is create a 30-foot defensible space around your home.

“You can create this defensible space by taking out the invasive plant life, but you want to leave your indigenous plant life,” Hunter said.

Other tips include:

• Consistently monitor defensible space for maximum fire prevention.
• Remove flash fuels such as dead grass (Do NOT remove live native plants from Natural Area Open Space).
• Trim trees within the 30-foot defensible space around the home so the canopy is not touching the ground; remove any dead branches or leaves.
• Trim grass and foliage around trees.
• Keep gutters, eaves and roof clear of leaves and other debris.
• Do not stack wood or other flammable materials within the 30-foot defensible space.
• Keep a rolled up garden hose with a nozzle attached to an outside hose valve connection.
• Don’t smoke in the Natural Area Open Space.

The city fire department will also work with homeowners associations to design defensible spaces.
More information, including a list of invasive species and pictures to identify them is available at the city’s website, scottsdale.gov and search wildfire prevention.

J. Graber can be reached at jgraber@iniusa.org. We invite our readers to submit their civil comments pro or con on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.