Weeds and more weeds

Vera asked about our weeds and about wild species and/or protected plants we have in the area.

Here is my rather long-winded answer:

First - weeds.

Our Amish neighbor says a weed is a plant that's growing in the wrong place.

By that definition we have a few misplaced plants in our garden. I actually don't know the botanical names of most of them.  

Since we are trying to keep our land in organic certification, we don't usually use herbicides. Still, cutting, digging or mowing in the right season can do a lot to control undesirable plants. Like all gardening/farming, patience is a key part of the strategy. If we don't do it this year, we can do it next year...

We try to keep the open soil in the garden covered with mulch (straw). This keeps light off anything that germinates and keeps the soil moist so weeds are easy to pull. We try to pull things before they are very large so I don't recognize most of the plants I remove, but many are grasses from the nearby pastures and hayfields. This would include various rye grasses, quack grass(Elytrigia repens) and a local rye variant called 'court grass.' 
One of the most common weeds is not a grass but a forb: giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida). The seedling of this weed (weedling?) closely resembles the full grown plant and we often see these in the garden. Fortunately, they are very easy to pull up, even when well along.

We almost never allow a weed to go to seed in the garden, so all the seeds have to come in some other way - wind, birds, on our clothes or in the compost and mulch we use. As a result we don't have an overwhelming number of weeds in the garden itself. Still, we pull quite a few small plants every week.

Outside the garden but close to the house, our biggest problem is with invasive plants (obviously very far from where they belong). These include burdock, white sweet clover (Melilotus alba), birdsfoot trefoil ((Lotus corniculatus) and Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense).  

Burdock (Arctium, family Asteraceae) is an invasive plant that came from Europe. When we first bought the farm the area around the old house was a solid burdock forest, with plants 2 m high in places. We have mostly eliminated it from the area around the garden but a few seeds manage to sneak in. They can be very hard to pull out if I don't catch them quickly - the taproot can go down a meter or more. However, burdock is a biennial and is easy to kill in the second year - I use a sharpened trench shovel and cut diagonally through the taproot about 10 cm below ground level, pulling off the leafy top and leaving the taproot as a feast for insects.  

We spend a lot of time each year controlling non-native invasive plants. We learn more about them each year and the list keeps getting longer.  

A particularly nasty invasive plant is wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa). The sap of this plant is a potent skin irritant - but only after sun exposure. You can handle it all day as long as you are not exposed to sunlight and/or wash the sap off before being in the sun. (But who does gardening in the dark?) Anyway, with sun exposure to affected skin, wild parsnip sap can cause skin irritation that resembles second to third degree burns and can cause permanent scarring.  

Second: wild species and/or protected plants we have in the area.

The 'official' Wisconsin threatened plant list follows:

Dwarf lake iris (Iris lacustris) 
Status:Threatened

Eastern prairie fringed orchid (Platanthera leucophaea)
Status:Threatened

Fassett's locoweed (Oxytropis campestris var. chartacea) 
Status:Threatened 

Mead's milkweed (Asclepias meadii)
Status:Threatened 

Northern wild monkshood (Aconitum noveboracense)
Status:Threatened 

Pitcher's thistle (Cirsium pitcheri) 
Status:Threatened 

Prairie bush-clover (Lespedeza leptostachya)
Status:Threatened


I have to confess that I don't know if any of these grow on our land, but we do have some trillium in the woods. Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum) is a ground- hugging plant that blooms in mid spring. They have lovely three-petaled flowers (hence trillium) and can form a carpet of flowers in a oak forest. Unfortunately, white tailed deer eat trillium, and, just like all of Wisconsin, we have far too many deer on our property.

Other wild species that I am familiar with include hepatica, pasque flowers and many species of berries (blackberry, red and black raspberry and elderberries). The blackberries and black raspberries are native and very good eating. The red raspberries are a mix of native and imports. We also cultivate raspberries - there is a 100 m long row of summer and fall bearing raspberry plants along our south fence. 

An interesting wild species of mushroom grows in our forest. These are called morels and resemble truffles in that they grow around trees (in the case of morels, elm trees) and are earthy in taste. We are on the edge of the morel season right now - they show up in mid spring. I put them on my grill along with a piece of steak - very good...

Warren