(no subject)

[42itous]

What's this?

Comments

[tacotortoise.livejournal.com]

Looks like pokeweed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytolacca_americana) to me.

[42itous.livejournal.com]

So it does -- thank you! It's funny how there are wild plants I know by sight, and I've heard their names but never made the connection.
I just pulled two armfuls of pokeweed out of my garden yesterday. Pretty stuff, but it was shading my strawberries. :)

[blk]

Pokeweed is evil. It can be pretty, but it's a weed. All parts of it are poisonous (stem and root especially but just berries have caused death in children). The berries stain things. Birds eat the berries (doesn't bother them) and then their poop stains things. The rootballs in well-developed plants are HUGE and difficult to dig up. They reseed madly and grow easily. They die off completely in the fall/winter, but unless you dig the roots out, will grow back fully in the spring.

We had a small pokeweed jungle in our yard that xuth toiled to clear out last summer, and I still go through it at least once a month to pull out baby plants of it.

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Now I'm sorry I didn't get to it sooner. The problem with this patch is that It's bordered on three sides with big spiky holly bushes and on one side with a four-foot-high chain link fence. I pulled all the foliage and berries out of there over the fence, but obviously the rootballs (and four feet of stalks) are still there. When it's cool enough for long pants, long sleeves, and gloves, I guess I'll go in through the holly and attack it.

Funfun: there's bittersweet tangled among the pokeweed and the fence, too.

[callyperry.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the first time I looked this stuff up, when we first moved to Sharon, there was a scary note. It said, whatever you do, don't put this in the trash, or your dump will be overrun with the stuff. eek.