Sudden infestation with this yellow flowered low-leaved tall gangly plant

[Danny D.]

That's because it did!

[Danny D.]

Well, I experimented this morning with the weed washer thing:

It gave mixed results ...

Here you see me begin my attack on a combination of Scotch & Spanish Broom, which infests acres of my hillsides:

I start by plunging the double-barreled weed waster directly into the heart of the noxious weeds, and holding it there for minutes at a time, as muddy fluids bubbled out and down the hillside:

The Scotch Broom surrenders as easily as the French in WWII, after just a few moments of coercion; but the Spanish Broom stood its ground with the tenacity of Japanese Bushido:

The problem is that you can't press any deeper than the foot pedal, so, you can only go about six inches deep:

So, you can soak, and soak, and soak, but you're only going to liquify the first foot or so of soil - and nothing much deeper:

So, I ditched the double-barreled water washer:

And, brought back my trusty American Made brass hose nozzle:

I wrapped the Spanish Broom in my hand like a bronco rider:

And I pulled. And I tugged. And I pulled harder. And tugged harder!

It wouldn't budge!

Finally, I resorted to *the claw*:

Exhausted, mud spattered, battered, bruised, the enemy finally yielded, the wrist-thick root cut off, its dying grip still holding fast to the soil:

Having said all that above, the mixed results are that on much younger and smaller enemies, the water weeder things did work wonders, making it trivially easy to pull them out by hand:

[Danny D.]

Just to report back to the team, when I picked on the smaller, more vulnerable weeds, like the Wild Mustard, and baby Scotch and infant Spanish Broom, the weed washer method worked rather well.

These branched Spanish Broom babies came up easily:

The Spanish Broom infants were almost trivial when wet:

Some held on for a few seconds, but eventually yielded easily:

The thick-rooted ones were the worst - but even they fell:

So, it seems, the water nozzle trick *does work* rather well:

As long as we pick on weeds with taproots of only a foot or two:

[The Daring Dufas]

Not at all Danny, I think it's great that you post links to pictures of what you're writing about. You're not forcing anybody to look at your pictures and anyone who chastises you for posting links to pictures is an idiot. I have pictures of the kind of work I do and have posted a link here to some of them in the past. Since me and JH do contract labor for a national service company, I have to take pictures of the repairs and installations we do all the time then upload them to the company's website. I also must label the pictures with the work order number, job name and the date. Keep on posting links to your pictures Danny, it does help me learn about what your problems are and the solutions that you come up with. ^_^

TDD

[Roy]

And those smaller sized pics are great as well Danny. Good show.

[Danny D.]

I hate to provide *less* information than I can, but, the consolation is that anyone interested can substitute "img" for the "640" to get that larger image.

[Danny D.]

Funny thing happened today when I opened the green garden recycling bin. All the nascent flowers had erupted into seeds!

Now I know why they said you have to collect the heads - as the Bull Thistle spends all its remaining energy making sure the seeds survive:

And, I can see why they said the plant only spreads a few feet, as the seed itself extremely easily falls off the downy parachute:

[JoeBro]

"Danny D." wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Well Danny, I don't think you are a dark horse. I think you are a moron.

[Fran Jones]

Spoken by one who should know because he has a lot of practice being one.

[Pat Kiewicz]

My brother would freak just thinking about such giant poison oak plants. As a kid, he spent much of one summer indoors due to an extreme reaction (that required medical intervention and injections). He can get a rash just walking by a patch. As the older sib I had to learn to identify poison ivy and point it out. All these years later, it's still automatic for me to ID poison ivy, oak, or sumac to anyone nearby. I am amazingly good at spotting it.

Oh, an good on you for relocating rather than eliminating the snakes and such. Though I don't think I'd be as kind to the black widows. I only rescue jumping spiders. I sometimes rescue the crab spiders that come in on flowers. The rest get squished.

[oga]

hello world

[Danny D.]

I understand what you mean, as I am always identifying it for the grandkids, who wander by oblivious to all harm.

Nobody is immune to cell-mediated immune responses (since the T-Cell are randomly generated and passed by the Thymus), but some people just haven't (randomly) gotten it yet. Or, they haven't gotten enough of a dose that their T-Cells wandered by a urushiol quinone which has bound to a receptor site on a Langerhans cell in their skin.

NOTE: Contact dermatitis is NOT mediated by humoral antigen/antibody responses, so, all the conventional wisdom of "being immune" goes out the door.

In the case of the amount of sap in that picture, almost nobody on earth would not respond to that amount, were it to touch skin (keeping in mind, the urushiol oil is known to stay active over 100 years in dendrology drawers) and probably 10 years in my relatively dry climate.

[Kay Lancaster]

Gads! That's a 500 year supply for me!

Not just the purple, but the green "ball" underneath it. That's where the seeds are going to form.

Thistles are members of the Asteraceae, also known as the Compositae, a very large family where the individual flowers are often mistaken for "petals". The seed forming portion of the flower, the ovary, is underneath the actual flower, and inside that cluster of overlapping green bracts. And there can be literally thousands of flowers in one of these "flower-looking" inflorescences (cluster of flowers).

If you think of a dandelion "flower", it's a disk about an inch or so across when blooming. There are lots of little green leafy things surrounding each "flower", that are really bracts, modified leaves.

shows the greenish and brownish bracts on red-seeded dandelion, a species you probably haven't met. And then you can see the yellowish things that most people think of as petals, but they're actually complete flowers... just a whole bunch of them gathered up together. See those sticky-up things with a double curlicue at the tip? those are the tips of the pistil, which, like the mustard, is a compound ovary with two carpels -- the curls are the stigmas of the flowers. T

Here's a photo of a single dandelion flower:

The curls at the top are the stigmas, and then just below that, you'll notice a thicker yellow ring. That ring is 5 stamens, fused together by their anthers, into a ring around the style of the pistil. Inside the ring of stamens is the "neck" of the pistil, called the style, and way down at the bottom of the flower, you'll see something that looks like a small white sunflower "seed", which is the ovary of the flower. The white fluff is usually interpreted as sepals, modified into seed hairs. The flat yellow thing over to one side is actually 5 petals, fused together through most of their length if you look at a dandelion flower you'll see that the "petals" look like they've got teeth, and those are the tips of the real petals.

So whole flower-like inflorescence has multiple flowers crowded in it (why? Probably because it's easier for pollinators to spot a big clump of little flowers than single little flowers. It also spreads the bloom time, lengthening the time when there's a chance a pollinator might pollinate it and you'd get seeds forming. Once all the flowers in the head have bloomed, the bracts close up, and you get the narrow fluff-end stage as the petals and stamens dry up and the pistils start maturing their seeds.

And finally, when the seeds inside the fruits are mature, the bracts drop once again and you get the fluffball stage: where you can see the white hairs that were WAY down in the real flower making the downy parachutes for the matured fruits, the brown seeds.

Anyhow, your thistle heads are put together similarly, but a little different. And each of the groups of fluff are going to have a seed attached to parachute onto some new bare ground and possibly start yet another thistle.

So that's probably more than you've ever wanted to know about the structure of Asteraceae inflorescences, or as most people think of them, "flowers". There's an incredible amount of variation in structure of flowers and inflorescences in the Asteraceae, and thistles and dandelions are just part of the story.

Oh yeah, sometime when you're really bored, ask me about dandelion sex.

Kay

[Kay Lancaster]

8-)

Pretty much like anything else... dump it in a hot pile, add water, stir periodically, and turn it into compost. If you can get the whole pile heated to about 140, it's not going to grow.

Kay

[Kay Lancaster]

Looks more like a petal that hasn't completely colored up yet. But that's really hard to tell in a photo.

If you look at sepals and petals on almost all flowers, you'll find that each series of flower parts are in whorls -- multiple parts all coming out at the same level. So the lowest series is the sepals. Let's say in an opened out mustard flower, they're laid out like a + sign. The next whorl is petals, and if the sepals are laid out like a + sign, the petals will be an X. Then there will be

4 stamens, laid out like a + and two more like two arms of the X, and finally in the middle, the two chambers of the ovary, the two carpels joined together to form a single fruit.

is a pretty good view of the flower of a different species of mustard from the side... in this case, both the sepals and petals are yellow, but different shapes, and you can also see the four long stamens and two shorter ones most of the mustards have. and is a lily flower straight on, and you can see the different shapes of the sepals, the narrower "petals" and the wider petals. Unfortunately, it's not a good photo of the stamens or ovary, but I'll take what I can get here.

And yes, I can rattle on for hours about flower parts and how to interpret what you're seeing... it's one of the major tools for plant identification, once you get beyond pure recognition of different species.

Kay

[Pat Kiewicz]

I've never gotten a rash from poison ivy, even when (as a kid) I was dared to rub a leaf on my skin, or when I've pulled seedlings out bare-handed. My dad's side of the family, very vigorous reactors. My mother never has, if I recall correctly.

Which is sort of odd, as both my mother and I have had serious reactions to other chemicals and adhesives. I've had at least one quite serious case of photoallergic dermatitis which required (unpleasant) steroid therapy and I have to carefully read labels to avoid certain preservatives and also avoid sun-screens other than zinc oxide. I mainly rely on sun protective clothing and hats, which means long sleeves and long pants no matter how hot it is. (Coolibar makes some clever items, but it's still easy to overheat.)

That I could believe.

[Aahz Maruch]

You need goats, lots of goats.

[Billy]

I'm the same with poison oak, but my understanding is that this can change without notice.