Know Your Noxious Weeds for Fall Removal

Autumn is a good time to get moving on ridding your garden and open spaces of noxious weeds. There is a two fold reason get Autumn weeding. First you can get the stalks and seeds before they go into the ground and wait out the Winter getting nourished by soil and a snow cover. The other advantage is that it is cool outdoors and you can see them in bloom.

The noxious weed is a funny plant. Some are quite showy in color. Many people mistake some noxious weeds for flowers. In fact several years ago my neighbor gave me a daisy plant. It was in fact not a daisy, but a noxious weed. I couldn't bring myself to tell her that Andy and I had spent many hours trying to get rid of the obnoxious Oxeye Daisy from the garden. An image of the Oxeye Daisy is shown in image 1. Many people are confused even some Native Montanans about the Oxeye Daisy.

Some other Category One noxious weeds found in Montana and in the West are the Whitetop Complex, Diffuse Knapweed, Spotted Knapweed, Russian Knapweed, Field Bindweed, Houndstongue, St. Johnswort, Yellow Toadflax and Tall Buttercup.

Each of the above weeds have a sweet flower and appear benign. The easiest to pick out is the dreaded Spotted Knapweed. It has a showy purple pink flower that looks pretty along the river beds and in the fields. It looks like two other noxious weeds, the Russian Knapweed and Canadian Thistle.

All of the above noxious weeds came from parts of Eurasia as an unwanted addition to crop seed. The dense colonies of noxious weeds can choke out other vegetation. See Image 2, Russian Knapweed

According to the University of Montana at Bozeman nearly 8.4 million acres of Montana is covered in weeds. This factor creates a significant problem to agriculture and the value of land. The costs in weed eradication is in the millions of dollars. The cost of various local and state agencies to monitor and enforce laws concerning the noxious weed is another cost.