Queen Anne's Lace / Wild Carrot

 Queen Anne's Lace (QAL) is a common summer weed.  Its range is pretty broad, as witnessed by the University of Minnesota page on it.  I had some the first year I moved into my former house, but after mowing in the bloom stage, it disappeared and I never saw it again.  In my new house, I haven't seen it before this year. 

 

This year I have a bunch of it growing along a fence line by the road.  Some seeds apparently blew in from somewhere.  The above picture might actually be of a related plant, wild carrot. Until i went looking, I wasn't aware there was a difference between wild carrot and QAL.

QAL typically has a red flower cluster in the middle of the bloom.  The above picture (and all of what I have growing) lacks that.  However, according to Green Deane, QAL (Daucus carota) and wild carrot (Daucus pusillus) are related but the latter lacks the red flowers (QAL may sometimes be without the red center, too). QAL is non-native, but wild carrot grows here naturally.  Both have a carrot smell to them.  I think I might have nibbled on a root at some point, but in general, there's nothing worthwhile about these plants unless one is lost in the wilderness and starving.  Domesticated carrots are the way to go if one wants edible roots.

Thistles have nice flowers, but then they go bad. It's a similar situation with QAL/wild carrot.  I want to avoid having that happen if possible.  I don't really want a field full of them next season. So I headed out to where the plants are growing and snipped off the seed heads.

Fortunately, the problem is relatively contained for now, and hopefully my intervention will keep it that way--as it is, some of the seed heads had probably already released their seeds before I intervened.  I also expect the plants to respond to the loss of their reproductive capacity by putting out new flowers.  They seem to both stay in bloom longer than thistles and take longer to mature their seeds after the flowers close.  That gives me a little time.  Thistles transition from good to bad very quickly.

 If I'm not successful, the only other control mechanism will be mowing next year when blooms first emerge, and keeping it up as they re-emerge.

Volunteer Pines

In the south, pines are weeds.  There are some varieties that are nice, and all are useful for lumber or pulp, but for a homeowner with land, they're just a pain.  When I bought my house a few years ago, it was pretty clear of volunteer pines.  The house had been vacant for a while, and the upkeep was limited in some respects, but the approach to the house and the back yard were in relatively good shape.  A few years later a number of pines had grown up, and I cut a lot down with my clearing saw.

Fast foward two years, and the ones I didn't get last time have grown up (in some cases they were too small to cut with the saw (the stems just bent away from the saw blade)].  Then others have grown up as well, and some of the ones I cut two years ago coppiced (small shoots grew out from the trunk below where I cut, in turn growing taller themselves).

So I went to work.  One area was dense enough that I was able to make pretty short work of them with a pair of loppers.  The stems were so soft that I could cut even fairly large ones easily.

Based on size, these were probably up to about four years old.  Most were probably a couple of years old, which sounds about right given the last time I cleared the area.

A few were as large as 2" in diameter near the base, but most were  1.5" or less.  Probably a third of them were slender stems with plants that were 18" to 2' in height, just 1-2 years old.  And there were some sprouts, which I just pulled.

After about an hour of work, the area above looked like this:

Most of them are on the ground and stacked in the foreground of the photo. You can still see additional standing pines to the left and more up near the house.  After another hours' work, the lower ones are all gone and about half of the ones up near the house have been felled, as well.  They're all loaded on the truck now for a trip to a mulching place.

Before hauling them, I'll strap them down to hold them in place.  This is probably 300-400 trees.

After this, I have plenty of other pines.  There are some in an overgrown pasture that are now over 10 years old, so they're pretty large.  And I have others that are 5-10 years of age, plenty tall in their own right.  The older ones have some value as firewood, but the stems in the truck above are too small to make that worthwhile.  Stripping the side branches and cutting the stems to length wouldn't be worth the effort.

Still More on Thistles

Here's a case study on thistles gone rogue.  This is a picture of a field, not someone's yard:  But they haven't mowed during thistle blooming season for the last few years and now have a problem.   It's hard to see how this field will produce much but thistles in a few years.

At one time it was a field of purple blooms, but there's nothing attractive about this.

Update on my own thistles: I mowed them down as noted previously, and they haven't sent up any more vertical stems.  However, they haven't died, either.  I expect them to be back next year.

I'm fortunate that I don't have any thistle growing in inaccessible or far-flung areas.  I could use my scythe or weed eater to take care of them almost anywhere, but it's better not to have to worry about it.

Another Weed Flower

I've written about blooming weeds before, such as jewel weed.  Blackberry can be considered a weed, too; it is in bloom in late April / early May in north Georgia; it spreads aggressively; it also sometimes yields good fruit.

Another weed that both blooms and has the potential to spread is thistle.  There are a lot of varieties, and I'm not sure which one is in my back yard.  I have a couple of plants back there that seem to recur, although I cut them before they set seed.  Most thistles are annual or biennial, so I'm not sure why this happens every spring in the same place. One that is at least somewhat perennial and can spread by roots is Canadian thistle.

That notwithstanding, the blooms are large, pretty, and have a nice fragrance.  If they set seed, though, watch out. one plant can produce tens of thousands of seeds per year.

There are open fields not too far away that are heavily-infested and unattended, so they're getting worse with every passing year.

Here's another view of the plant that shows its form better; Canadian thistles have smooth upper stems, so that checks.   In the background of both shots you can see another non-native invasive that is truly worthless, privet.  I have a lot of it around and I'm going to try to cut a lot of it back this year.  While it does bloom, I don't really like those flowers at all.  Bizarrely, privet is still sold in nurseries...

Shown below is a stand of thistle near an Interstate on ramp.  Although the display may be reasonably attractive in the photo, if it isn't mowed soon a million seeds will be produced within a couple of months (possibly quite literally a million--or more).

While one or two plants can be nice, I'm fortunate I don't have more of it.

Update: Okay, so maybe it's not a good idea to have even one or two.  About three weeks after the above pictures were taken, the first flower had turned to seed, although new blooms were still opening.  I didn't get to it and bag it before some seeds escaped...but not many.  Alas.

Weed Roses

It appears I have some multiflora rose, aka weeds, growing here and there... I have some upright canes but mostly ones that snake along the ground.  The leaves and thorns make it obvious that they're roses; this is the first year that I have seen any blooms.

They're fragrant enough, but their invasive properties (and susceptibility to rose rosette disease) render them undesirable.  I'm going to be more aggressive about dealing with them.

They're growing mostly in a fairly shady area, competing with blackberries and other similar plants. At least they don't grow very fast, so cutting them and keeping them back should be relatively easy.