Lucky Ones Coffee signed their lease for five more years in the space connected to the Park City Library, bringing a revamp to the aesthetics of the space and functionality of the barista area. 

The coffee shop is set to reopen Wednesday and has an official ribbon cutting for the renovated space set for a tentative date later in July. 

“Hopefully, we will be functional on the 3rd — work out some kinks. We’ll be open on the 4th because it’s always one of the busiest days in here,” co-owner Katie Manhart said. She explained there will be additional finishing touches over the next few weeks leading up to the ribbon cutting. There are plans to work with the library and an interior designer to bring in new furniture and revamp the overall space. 

“Initially, when we ripped everything out we were like, ‘We’re doing it in a week,’ so cute and naive,” Manhart said.

Hitting a couple snags with redoing plumbing, which required shutting the water off in the entire library, and shipments that included tracking down a misplaced fridge in a Salt Lake warehouse, Manhart and the crew are excited to reopen. 

Lucky Ones Coffee’s mission is to employ and empower individuals with disabilities. They started with 10 staff members when they opened six years ago and now have a second store in Kamas with a total of 29 staff members. 

The post Lucky Ones Coffee ready to pour again appeared first on Park Record.

Patches of bright yellow that tips nearly into neon hues make up many open fields and stretches of road and trailside during late spring along the Wasatch Back. This highlighter-colored flower is known as Dyer’s woad and is out of place in Summit County and the rest of the United States. And so volunteers yank the plant out of the ground wherever they can. 

Maddie Nelson, open space supervisor at Snyderville Basin Special Recreation District, was part of the team leading a volunteer weed pull to help in the management of the nuisance flora she described as “branching umbrella of yellow flowers” that are “almost yellow green like a tennis ball.” The Utah State University Extension lists the woad as a class two noxious weed, a priority for controlling its spread.

“Hand pulling is really effective because you remove those seeds from the system,” Nelson said. With consecutive treatment every year, progress can be made on irradiating Dyers woad from an area. “After seven to 10 years you can really see a reduction in the number of plants,” she said.

Volunteers Emma Paulides and Katie Noelck, alongside a handful of others, were part of the force pulling weeds near the Willow Creek Dog Park pond. Outfitted with gloves and armed with hand clippers, the volunteer team worked to remove the now-wilting flowerheads and place them into black trash bags. 

Herbicide is sometimes a necessary approach, but weed pulls like the one on Friday morning are effective at stemming the ability of the plant to drop seeds back into the soil. 

The plant was introduced to Utah in the mid 1800s as a way to access indigo dye. When processed, the plant releases a blue hue that was once used for dyes. The importance of controlling Dyer’s woad and other noxious weeds is due to their competition with native species. 

“By supporting native species, we’re really supporting pollinators and flora and fauna that exist in nature,” Nelson said, mentioning the over 1,000 native bee species in Utah as well as butterflies and other pollinators. “It can be hard if you don’t know what a noxious weed is.”

Nelson said that the Summit Cooperative Weed Management Area is a good local resource to find more information about how to manage noxious weeds on private properties. 

There is one more weed pulling event sponsored by Basin Recreation tentatively planned for July, but the window to pull Dyer’s woad and garlic mustard, another noxious weed, closes soon because it can be more harmful to disturb the plants when they have seeded out. The risk of further spreading seeds outweighs the option to let the plant stay where it is, in hopes of eradicating the stand of noxious weeds the following season.

The post Basin Rec and volunteers combat Dyer’s woad by hand appeared first on Park Record.