Home » Plants & Animals » Shade Gardening » Early Weeds - Part 3 - Page 3

Early Weeds - Part 3 - Page 3

© Marge Talt

Actually, these two chickweeds aren't related at all. Mouse-eared chickweed is one of fifty to a hundred or so annual or perennial weeds and herbs (including C. tomentosum, snow-in-summer, valued for its gray foliage) from the north temperate regions of the world. It is native to Europe, but widespread throughout the U.S. and Canada in moist, sunny or lightly shaded places.

This is another weed of my gravel driveway that drives me batty in spring. I pull them and new ones sprout, so I pull them again. They start germinating in very early spring and continue germinating until hot weather arrives.

I always thought they were annuals, but research indicates that they are usually perennials or sometimes biennials, who are stimulated toward even more growth when cut back, as happens when they are growing in a lawn and are mowed.

Chickweed, which gets its common name from the fact that chickens love it, is also edible for humans (both stems and leaves), although the mouse-eared species is too coarse to eat raw and must be cooked. It's a good source or vitamin C, iron, and phosphorus.

This is a selection of stems of varying ages, along with a penny for scale. The one on the far right is a seedling; the; middle one is a bit older and the one on the left has formed flower buds. You can see that the older stem has started putting out branches from the base of the plant, which is typical. They can grow to be from three to fifteen inches (8 - 40cm) tall.

These all came from the gravel driveway, where they tend to be a bit more upright in habit than they might be in a garden bed, where the stems root at the nodes where they touch soil.

This scan shows a flowering stem. Flowers generally come in threes at the tips of the rather hairy stems.

Here's a close-up of the flowers - you can see the somewhat sticky hairs, which, I was delighted to note on close examination, were full of aphids. If there's one plant that deserves aphids, it's this one. Of course, the flowers closed when I pulled the plant for scanning. Here are some good images of the flower when it's open.

I pull these by the bucket load and I've learned that you must be sure to get the crown, if not the entire root system, so it won't simply regenerate. This is also true of the common chickweed, if you don't get the crown at the main stem, it'll grow right back.

The copyright of the article Early Weeds - Part 3 - Page 3 in Shade Gardening is owned by . Permission to republish Early Weeds - Part 3 - Page 3 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.