The Carlisle Soccer Club is making a drive to eradicate the dreaded sand burr (see photo at right) from our soccer complex and we need your help.

Despite all our efforts to keep water on the grass and smother out the sand burrs, they’ve come back again with the hot, dry weather of the past couple of weeks. We’ve been able to get a lot of them up with our bagging lawn mower, but there are still some on the fields. We have learned about a pre-emergence herbicide that we can put on in the spring, but that won’t solve our problem now.

Our goal is to literally pull all the remaining sand burr plants out from our playing fields. What we need from coaches, team parent and parents is to organize your teams and gather additional friends and family to head out to the complex and pull these plants out from the ground. We will need to focus initially on just the playing areas of the game fields and we’ll progress into the walk ways in between the fields as well throughout the month. Obviously this need is immediate with our first set of games starting this weekend. You and your teams are free to head out at any time, the sooner the better. Our goal is to completely rid the sand burr plant by the end of September.

Wear work gloves and pull as much of the plant out of the ground as possible.

Collect your team’s sand burr plants and we will set up a scale for weighing what is picked. Put it on the scale and let Paul Gruber know how much your team picked. The team with the greatest weight total of picked sand burr weeds wins a Pizza Party for their end of season team celebration.

To focus our efforts, work on the field associated with your age group. Therefore, u10 teams work on the u10 field, u12 on the u12 field, etc. Also, remember to remind your Burr Eradicator’s to wear shoes (no sandals or flip flops) and gloves. If you have empty five gallon buckets, please bring them.

If you have any questions, contact Chad Cooper or Paul Gruber.