Pickleville Philosophy

By Jim Stone
The Pickleville Philosopher

There is so much beauty in the magical outdoors. But even though some things are beautiful, which they are, sometimes a beautiful thing can be a bad thing. 

The brilliant yellow flower it is very pretty but it’s a noxious weed that takes over all the other flowers and feed for Mother Nature’s animals.   Dyers Woad was introduced to Utah in 1932 from England.

I was so blessed to be a Boy Scout leader for 7 years. There is a bounty of  $10 dollars for each bag of Dyers Woad and it is paid by Rich County to youth who will pull up these weeds. The county supplies the bags, so I would take the Boy Scouts on a community outing and we all would learn about Mother Nature and pull out this beautiful flower.  The kids would learn how to work hard but have a reward for doing something that teaches them to be a steward of the outdoors, protecting all of our natural resources.

It’s a wonderful learning experience to be in the outdoors seeing all of the beautiful things that are so prevalent here.

The cool thing is all spending time together cleaning up the outdoors making a better place for the wild things that belong in the outdoors.  So we would pull this noxious weed out of the ground and turn it in to the county, then get paid for our efforts. After working hard all together it was reward time for doing something fun and positive all together.

We took the money and went to get double cheese burgers, fries or onion rings, a drink, or an ice cream shake.  It was a wonderful opportunity to clean up our communities, help wild life and make some money.  Then all go together and talk about what we all saw and did.

Plus get a big reward when we are all together making not only our communities better but having a big reward just for paying attention to things that need to be controlled and be eliminated so that more beautiful things that help all environment can have a better chance to survive.