Is it a plant or a weed?

Aug 3, 2018 | Gardening

If you ask any farmer or gardener what a weed is, they will invariably tell you that it is something growing where you don’t want it to.

Sadly, we have two pastures that are now brimming with things growing where they shouldn’t be.

Earlier this summer, Hubby tilled up two of our pastures in order to reseed them with a pasture grass mix that our animals could graze on. This was a lot of work, at least from my perspective sitting on the back deck, cold drink in hand.

First, Hubby had to drive the tractor around & around tilling up the soil to loosen it & hopefully dislodge any existing weeds. Then he had to do that all over again with a cultivator attachment to break up all the big clods of dirt from the tilling.

And finally came the seeding.

I love this old International Harvester drill seeder which is most likely from the 1940’s.

I find the gears & all the thingamajigs to be quite fascinating.

Once the seeding was done, we waited for rain & heat so the seeds could sprout & grow. We do what is called dry land farming which means we don’t irrigate, & is a fairly common practice when you don’t have easy access to water. Yes, we do have a well, but the large amount of water that would be needed to irrigate, not to mention the type of equipment to deliver the water is not something that we have. In other words, it is not like hooking up your garden sprinkler.

Did I mention that we were in a drought? We waited for the rain, but got a lot of wind instead. And then we finally got rain in the form of gully washers & some hail for several afternoons. Colorado’s weather, at least here, can be one of extremes.

Finally, the the grass began to emerge in one of the pastures, but in the other, weeds began to proliferate. The alpacas like some of the weeds, thank goodness, but not others, such as the puncture vine…can’t say as I blame them for not eating that one.

But our biggest problem started popping up a few weeks ago almost exclusively in the two pastures hubby had worked so hard on – the Palmer Amaranth, also known as Pig Weed. This is where a plant vs a weed comes in to play. Yes, this is the same amaranth that has become so popular as a flour and in cereals because of it’s great nutritional value and it’s lack of gluten. There is basically nothing wrong with it, but it is not where we want it, and so, it is a weed. And to make matters worse, it can grow 2-3″ per day!!

This whole weed thing got me curious about what else was growing on our property. I knew we had other kinds of weeds, but I couldn’t identify most of them. So armed with my camera, off I went to photograph everything I didn’t recognize.

Bad idea. What is that expression about curiosity killed the cat, too bad it couldn’t kill the weed!

As I started doing research, I realized that we had several varieties of what the Colorado Dept of Ag considers “noxious”, or from my point of view, obnoxious weeds.

A noxious weed is basically a non North American native plant that has been designated as harmful to agriculture or livestock, and in many cases, is designated for “eradication”!

Some of these weeds are actually quite pretty and one that I found which I had not seen on our property before is a Chinese Clematis. Pretty yellow flowers, looks like your average clematis, except this one is native to Eurasia and…..