Weed of the week - ragweed

Your eyes may have just started to water just looking at these images of giant ragweed. The plants can reach 7-8 feet tall easy and a local walking/bicycling trail goes through a virtual gully of them just now coming into bloom. There are so many flowers they'll leave a yellow dusting of haploid males (pollen) on the ground.  Woe be to any allergic people who hazard this gauntlet.  Both the common and giant ragweeds are easy enough to recognize, but they are usually ignored in the spring when they are more easily controlled by mowing them down or whacking them out, or by herbicide application in the spring or early summer.  Too late now.  The smaller common ragweed showed up in an older blog and you will notice the highly lobed leaves that Linnaeus thought resembled wormwood, thus Ambrosia artemisiifolia.  Notice that the giant ragweed has three lobed leaves Ambrosia trifida (shown above) and the flowers are not showy at all because it's wind pollinated, so the co-flowering goldenrod gets the blame for hayfever. The flowers shown are just prior to flowering.  How long can you hold your breath?  

Perils of lawn mowing

Our lawns need mowing in spite of the dry conditions interspersed with a couple of deluges. It's been nearly 3 weeks since they were last mowed, but the last thing a lawn needs in lolly-coddling. Crab grass is growing exceptionally well this year, and mowing will help prevent the production of a major crop of seeds. Mowing our lawn requires a lot of dodging and weaving in and around all the trees, bushes, and garden beds, and it's really icky out there right now because the garden spiders, many of whom are nearing the size of Shelob, have webs spanning up to 8 feet across walk ways. The problem is that your attention when mowing is directed downward so you walk into the webs head high. Now TPP doesn't have a major problem with spider, but the webs are icky nonetheless. The dry conditions have caused a lot of leaves to fall prematurely, and it is harvest season here abouts, and the lawn mower just kicks up clouds of dust and spores, something that sets off TPP's mucus production and irritates the sinuses. So adding to the tedium of lawn mowing is the misery of allergies and the ickiness of spider webs such that the enjoyment of the activity is largely lost. At least the lawn season is coming to an end.

Are you allergic to haploid males?

Smarting, itching, watery eyes? Well, you could be allergic to males, not human males, who are more likely to just be annoying, but those endosporic haploid males wafting about and hoping to land upon a receptive stigma but end up in your nasal passages instead, those plant male gametophytes better known as pollen. Aided and abetted by the warm, dry weather, this fall’s allergy season is in full gear. Ragweed pollen is at an all time high in the upper Midwest this year, and then you get to add in harvest dust with all its mold spores for an allergy aggravating cocktail. It's a wonder the Phactor can breath at all.