Weeding -- the walkway logs

One of our tasks as moorage renters is weeding the logs. Vegetation -- mostly invasive species -- floats downriver and attaches itself to the logs on the walkway and the mostly-underwater logs that hold up our houses. They flourish iin the water and warm summer air. If we don't remove the weeds, the roots dig into the logs and break them apart so they end up destroyed -- and expensive and hard to replace.

Most of the weeds come out pretty easily. I spent maybe a half hour doing all this weeding before an Open House party last week. There's a fence along one side of my houseboat and the only way I can access those logs to weed them is by kayak -- I have to bring gardening tools with me to get at them.

Then we leave the vegetation along the walkway to dry out and eventually toss them as far as we can into the flowing current. I am going to soon be on a "best practices" committee with the West Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District to create a handbook for moorage owners. It will be interesting to see if the result is that we shouldn't toss these weeds in the water where they might go downriver to invade some other place where they're unwanted.