Puncture vine -- sometimes called "goat head" vine -- is a noxious invasive weed.
The weed is like an infectious disease. I am getting it under control.
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| Clean field, recently drip-irrigated. |
This is a photo of my grapes. The land would be better protected if there were a cover crop. Before I can have a cover crop I need to have a clean, weedless field so that I can see, pull, and eradicate puncture vines that would otherwise be hidden amid the cover crop.
Little puncture vine plants look like this on the pumice soil where I have my grapes. The ultra-fine soil, made up of crushed pumice stone, is an excellent seedbed for puncture vine. The weed is low and flat and hides easily.
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Except for the photo above, the photos here are from noxious weed control websites, not my farm, thank goodness. Below is a plant that grew and went to seed. If you see this on your property, you have a big problem.
Here is a close-up of the leaves, flowers, and spiky seeds.
Below is another photo of the seed that makes the plant so very bad, and which gives it its name "puncture vine." These are rock-hard and very sharp. Mature plants have hundreds of these seeds. They hurt bare hands when you pull the weed. They stick to the bottom of shoes and rubber tires. Puncture vines are found most often alongside roadways and driveways. Your car tire can pick them up and bring them deep onto your property, where they can grow and spread rapidly.
There are bits of puncture vine in three vineyard rows. Two months after the T-posts were placed, I saw a tell-tale line of puncture vine sprouts in three of the 50 long rows where trucks drove. I walk those rows, and the adjacent ones, every three or four days, looking for and pulling or hoeing out baby plants out of the tire paths. The plants grow from invisible to the size of the palm of my hand in three days. I need to stay on this problem until all the hidden seeds have sprouted. Had I missed a baby plant, in about a week they would be the size of a dinner plate. In two weeks the size of a medium pizza. By then they would be forming seeds. Left to grow, they would become a green mat three or four feet across.
Keep an eye out, looking especially at the transition area between the road, any gravel area, and your landscaping. If you see a puncture vine, try to get all the root when you pull a small plant. A spritz of Roundup kills it better than does pulling it, if it is small, because the plant withers and dies before it goes to seed, and if you don't pull the root you haven't killed the plant. If you don't want to use Roundup, use a shovel or hoe to get all the root, and keep looking for re-sprouts.
If you see a plant bigger than a dinner plate, recognize it likely went to seed. Pull it as carefully as you can and put the plant (ideally with seeds still attached to it) in the garbage. If you feel sharp little kernels in that plant as you put it in the garbage, then it did indeed go to seed and you have a multi-year maintenance problem. Burn the area with a propane torch to try to kill the seeds, if you can do so safely. But that may be impossible. Assume there are seeds you missed and assume they will keep sprouting for several years. Be careful walking there with rubber-soled shoes or you will spread seeds to your garden areas. Check the area every week from mid-spring through late fall. Don't skip a week.
I realize this is unwelcome news, but that is the reality of puncture vine.
This a political blog, not a gardening blog, so let me make a quick semi-political point. Owning a vineyard is not the fashionable upscale hobby -- like having a country club membership -- that some people imagine it to be. It involves hard work. I don't feel the same sense of indignation many “city people” do when seeing high prices of groceries. Most people want food to be cheap. I don't. I want food to be expensive enough that farmers can make a living growing food.
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4 comments:
“I want food to be expensive enough that farmers can make a living growing food.”
And expensive enough that the immigrants we depend on to harvest most of our crops can be paid a decent wage for the grueling work…until Republicans round them all up and put them in concentration camps prior to deporting them.
By the way, those spiky seeds are also hell on dogs' feet.
Sounds like a lot of work being a farmer. We spend 11% of our income on food, which I consider to be amazingly low. Not that long ago I’m guessing we spent 80% on food 100 years ago. We take for granted cheap food and should not as our survival depends on the calories and our longer life expectancy is correlated with healthy eating of a variety of foods.
The potatoes famine in Ireland showed us what can happen if the food stops coming in.
It's been some years, but when I was younger, riding my bicycle to school ((about 3 miles), I had numerous flat tires caused by those pesky goat heads. And it's not just a poor dogs feet, but I've had them go clear through the sole sandals.
Only one of the several plants called goat heads actually have seeds that look like a goats head: Acanthospermum hispidum. Look it up!
The “real” goat head can flatten automobile tires, not to mention bike tires
In Dallas, where I was reared, we had both puncture vines (no fun, as we were perennially barefoot) but true goat heads were even worse
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