WEEDS UNSIGHTLY BUT PART OF A PLAN

The road to progress can be a weedy one.

Sure, those tall weeds are unsightly. Councilman Melvin Gateley calls them an eyesore.

But the contractor on the Walker Branch flood-control project says the weeds along the concrete channel are just part of a plan to put down a good turf.

First you let them grow. Then you kill them with chemicals. After that, you till the ground and plant rye grass and fescue.

Ultimately, you turn the mowing chores over to the city.

The contractor, Shappert Engineering of Rockford, Ill., has already started spraying the weeds.

"They will be dying over the weekend and next week and the following week they will be ground up and disked back into the ground," said Larry Morrissey, the project's construction superintendent.

Morrissey said strips of land bordering the channel will be seeded by machine around Sept. 17.

The strips of land between the Kingshighway guardrails and a metal fence along the west side of the channel are narrow.

"We will get a machine out there if we have to and pull a guardrail out or set it over with a crane," Morrissey said.

"We have a window of opportunity. It has to be done in the month of September," he explained.

The contractor did some temporary seeding last year to prevent erosion while construction work continued.

"We let that go to seed," said Morrissey. "A lot of Johnson grass is in there, but it makes a great mulch."

Gateley sees it as a nuisance. "It really is appalling to see how terrible it is along there," he said.

Gateley is active with Vision 2000, a civic-minded group that maintains tidy rose beds near many of Cape Girardeau's major intersections.

He said the weeds bordering the concrete channel along Kingshighway detract from the city's beauty.

But Morrissey promises the weeds will be gone soon.

The contractor will maintain the reseeded ground for three months. But with fall weather approaching, Morrissey said his company won't have to do a lot of mowing.

After that, it will be the city's responsibility to keep the grass cut.

City crews won't let the grass get too tall, said Ken Eftink, coordinator of development services for the city. "Our citizens remind us when we need to go out and mow."