What's sprouting, what are you pulling @ your house? What's got your rear in the air, your knees on the ground, your back aching, the foul language flowing, @ your house?

As soon as the ephemeral spring weeds disappear, like chickweed, cleavers, Carolina Geraniums, here comes the real weeds, the summer ones.

All of the following fooled me with interesting foliage, and in the case of the Commelina, curiosity.

In my yard, the chamber bitters are starting.


Leaving just one of these unpulled will result in hundreds more next year. They are not hard to pull, but pulling hundreds of anything that doesn't sprout until it gets hot, really stinks.


These are also sprouting, but haven't been as aggressive, or maybe I've been more aggressive pulling them, not totally sure:


I need to take a pic of a seedling of this horrible weed Commelina that looks cute in pics but is not in person. Let just one go to seed and there will be at least 100 next year:


Cudweed. A perennial that will adapt to growing so low that mowing doesn't bother it. Not that I care if it's in the lawn, but the seeds make their way into cultivated areas and these are hard to pull.


This awful thing, trampweek, looks like fur or hair if left to its own devices, and the rosettes can take up a lot of space.
https://www.inaturalist.org/gu...


Smilax seedlings are easy to pull, right up until they are not. If you don't want thorny briars in your cultivated areas, look for and pull these before they form a tuber:


Cherry laurels are beautiful trees, but if you garden near one, you could end up with a literal carpet of sprouts. I've tried taking a pic of seedlings before but there are so many, it just looks like a generic ground cover.


Never let dollarweed get near your garden. Once it gets in, you may not be able to get rid of it. I've been battling this for years and it WON'T STOP showing up. I'm having to re-smother a spot where I've been gardening for a few years. The round leaves are very attractive, but unmowed dollarweed "dollars" can get really tall, too tall to be a worthwhile ground cover under shrubs:


Inch plant. Will never stop creeping, ever, right over other plants because it grows so much faster than just about anything else. Easy to pull up, but impossible to do a thorough job of it, grows faster than I can pull.


And the version that blooms is so much harder to pull up, it gets much more strongly rooted, breaks much more easily



I have a very live'n'let'live attitude about plants, and I'm not saying that these plants have no inherent value of some kind, but any of the ones I've discussed would literally take over the plants I'm purposely cultivating and inhibit them so much that they would not survive. I can't NOT pull these and still have a cultivate garden.

I'm probably forgetting some but these are how I spent my weekend, pulling them. If anyone spots a very first sprout of any of these and pulls it before they have an invasion next year, this post will have been worthwhile.

chickweed, violets{a variety of them} things I don't know what they are and my worst is cat briar-maybe smilax? I keep ripping at it's sprouts and every once in awhile I get lucky and the root ball will come out with the stem. What a horrible plant! I can't see what purpose this evil thing has. It doesn't flower or make a berry so what's it's point? Except to annoy the crap out of me-no end! Plus the darn thing can get to be a trip hazard when it sneaks itself through existing perennial beds.

*I mean trampweed, not trampweek.

Brenda, your vine could be some kind of Smilax, if you are pulling young sprouts. I don't think Hulk Hogan could pull a mature Smilax tuber out of the ground. Because it has a tuber, that, in my book, makes it an easier plant to remove because if you dig up the tuber, that should be the end of it. Whatever it is most bloom and produce fruit or there could not be seedlings. If you can at least find where it emerges from the ground and cut all of the growth, that could help break the cycle by stopping new seeds from being dropped until you have time to go after the tubers with your shovel. You could put an upside-down pot over those spots to temporarily slow them down, weaken them.

Smilax genus, mostly pics of tubers:
Catbrier (Smilax)

As far as I know, the berries are similar for the various species:


This was about the size of a basketball, after being dug up:


Small, insignificant blooms:


There is a lot of Smiliax growing in the trees on our property line. I rarely see sprouts but I pull them ASAP if I do.

And you remind me about dewberry vines. Delicious berries but a patch big enough to harvest a batch of berries require a LOT of space, and requires heavy gloves to do anything with it or around it. It's not possible to share space with this as part of a cultivated garden.

I have a small patch of Commelina communis, that I actually encourage, Very easy to keep in bounds here. Makes a great ground cover around some of my hostas. Very dark glossy green leaves and a true deep blue color. I like it. Supposedly was commonly planted around thresholds.

C. communis is attractive, no argument there. I tried to encourage that when I lived in OH.

The plant I mentioned, C. diffusa, is not. Even for someone like me who purposely collects minuscule blooms for pots and for the "lawn." You have to find them under the foliage, and only in the morning. Can't tolerate in-town mowing so it has nowhere to go here.

Sprouting now, Geranium carolinianum, chickweed, cleavers (Galium aparine,) Vicia sativa.

Nothing sprouting now but henbit is a big one here and tiger lilies. Tiger lilies will be a big deal at the other house thanks to little cousins digging them up and flinging them everywhere. Gotta get dirt to fill the hole in again also. All weeds will be a big deal there. Gardens haven't been maintained in years as health declined.

chickweed as usual and it's other cohorts.

If I had tiger lilies, I wouldn't think of them as weeds.

Chickweed for me. It's growing like crazy inside the greenhouse because it's warmer in there. Yesterday I yanked out clumps of it. It'll come back, it always does...

I love that stuff. It provides a lot of green organic matter and then disappears very quickly.

Thinking chickweed is edible too.

Chickweed is a very very large portion of what I call my "lawn". It's green, spreads, stays relatively low, can walk on it, mow over it... close enough to grass for me!

[

Right now some kind of clover (I think it's a clover) and poa annua.

Maybe this? Your mention of clover reminded me this is in bloom now where I am.
Black Medic (Medicago lupulina)

Poa annua is the nicest grass of the dozen or so weeds masquerading as grass in our mowed area. If one prefers grass to be soft, green, not a vine, and not 2 feet tall.

No Ma'am. It has the shape of clover, although the "leaves" are really small and if you look really closely, there's almost like... striations on the leaves. I'll see if I can find one tomorrow and take a picture. We also have yellow flowering clover too.

Olay, I just googled it and it looks like black medic. And the yellow flowering ones are yellow woodsorrel. I'm just focusing on the poa annua and the assumed black medic for now as the woodsorrel is a real PITA.

When I lived in OH, I had a lot of Oxalis stricta, which gets way too tall to "play well with others" but the O. corniculata that I see here in AL is such a short plant that it doesn't cause much trouble.

On the other hand, this Oxalis is a valued member of the "good plants."

Our yellow woodsorrel doesn't get tall like yours did, but it does spread a lot. And I find it difficult to get out the way that it grows.

I have one of those pink ones in my shade garden. Well, several.

My Mom found it on the side of the road one day while walking and planted it at her house. I think she had three when I dug mine up. It didn't do as well for me (do you grow yours in sun or shade?) and I ended up digging it up its second year (it didn't even bloom for me).

Well, the next year, I found its children all over the garden bed. Needless to say, I left them, but there's too many to count. I don't know how it went from blooming once, to no blooms/being dug out, to spreading all over the garden bed.

Yours must have made seeds. Most of mine are gone after the drought a few summers ago when it didn't rain for 3 months. It's normal for that to go dormant for summer, but they have never come back at all. Before that drought, I had moved hundreds of them into lines around edges, circles around shrubs, and they seem to take a long time to recover from disturbance.