2/9/2024 0 Comments Tumblewees animated gif![]() ![]() It has also reached parts of Southern Africa, Australia, and Central and South America. They extend from China to the majority of Europe and North Africa. Tumbleweed plants have spread across the United States, including Alaska, Hawaii, and southern Canada. “Spreading rapidly as it is over new territory and becoming more destructive in the region already infested, it threatens serious consequences unless prompt measures are taken to subdue it.” He reported that the weed posed an existential threat to farms. In 1894, the USDA dispatched botanist Lyster Hoxie Dewey to investigate. “Cattle will graze it when the plants are young (before the leaves get spiny).” Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service ( USDA ARS). “Since the plant did not appear in North America until the 1870s, Native Americans have had relatively little time to discover a use for it,” says Lincoln Smith, research entomologist at the U.S. Russian thistle also contains nitrates and soluble oxalates in levels that are poisonous to sheep. They had few predators and offered little to farmers as a viable crop. Tumbleweeds sprouted quickly when the early farmers planted the infected grain, thriving in cleared areas of land and surviving on very little water. One plant can spread approximately 250,000 seeds per winter. As tumbleweeds tumble, they disperse seeds.A specific layer of cells allows for the easy separation of plant and root.Russian thistle seedlings thrive in loose, plowed, or eroded soil conditions, for example, those found on farms or along highway roadsides. ![]() Then, the tumbleweed life cycle starts again. By the fall, the plant has reached maturity, blossomed, and begun to dry out. It quickly sprouts two needle-like stalks and grows, grows, grows. The plant is ready to uncoil and germinate once it has absorbed water. They remain dormant until the weather warms up again. Each seed includes an embryonic plant wrapped in a thin membrane. The absence of a protective layer distinguishes the seeds. The Weed That Seeds Photo Credit: funkblast / Flickr / CC BY 2.0 These shrubby plants excelled at one thing - seed dispersal. Tumbleweeds had reached the California coast by 1895. In 1881, the county of Bon Homme, South Dakota, gave the United States Department of Agriculture its first note of concern about tumbleweeds. “The seeds arrived in grain imported from Russia (eastern Asia) by immigrant farmers in the western United States,” says David Salman, Chief Horticulturist for High Country Gardens in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The spread of the Russian thistle resulted in one of the fastest plant invasions in American history. They are invasive plants that hitchhiked to the United States with imported flax seeds during the 1870s. Origin of Tumbleweeds in the U.S.Įarly species of tumbleweeds are not a native part of the landscape of the American West as much as old Westerns might make you think. Tumbleweed facts: Tumbleweeds are not only a group of plants, but “tumbleweed” also refers to a process of seed dispersal adopted by multiple species of unrelated plants. ![]() During the Dust Bowl period in the 1930s, it was used as forage hay out of desperation when grasses failed. Still, once the tumbleweed plant has dried to a skeletonized ball of branches, it rarely becomes the breakfast of animals. Small rodents and antelope might eat the tender shoots. ![]() Unlike other weed seeds, which can live for decades, most tumbleweed seeds remain viable for only one year (though some live up to three years). The seeds germinate in the spring, flower in the summer or fall (depending on the species), and reproduce only by seed. Bright green and succulent when growing, it develops reddish or purple shoots and green flowers surrounded by prickly bracts. While many tumbleweed species exist, the Russian thistle ( Salsola tragus) is the best known. Tumbleweeds are various plants that, once mature, dry out, detach from the root and are gone with the wind. What Are Tumbleweeds? Photo Credit: funkblast / Flickr / CC BY 2.0 ![]()
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