48 GRAMINEAE (GRASS FAMILY) 
stems soon becoming very hard and the slender panicles ofter 
overgrown with a black fungus, whence the common name. Cattle 
will not touch it when other food can ‘be found. 
Culms thickly tufted, strong and wiry, two to four feet tall, 
erect, smooth, simple or occasionally branched. Sheaths but 
little shorter than the internodes, the ligule a ring of fine, shori 
hairs; leaves six inches to a foot long but less than a quarter. 
inch wide, smooth and flat. Panicle much elongated, slim, spike- 
like, often half the entire height of the plant. Spikelets about a 
tenth of an inch long, densely crowded on the erect branchlets of the 
panicle; they are smooth, shining, the glumes obtuse, very unequal, 
the lower one shorter and only about half the length of the third 
scale or lemma, which is acute and exceeds the obtuse palea. 
Means of control 
Put the land under thorough cultivation for a season in order tc 
destroy the perennial roots before reseeding heavily with grass o1 
clover of good quality. 
WILD OATS 
Avéna fdtua, L 
Introduced. Annual. Propagates by seeds. 
Time of bloom: June to July. 
Seed-time: July to August. 
Range: All parts of the country, but most abundant and trouble. 
some in the grain-growing sections of the Canadian provinces and 
in the United States from Minnesota to Oregon and California. 
Habitat: All soils; fields of cereal grains, flax, and the large-seeded 
grasses. 
Sowing Wild Oats is proverbially a bad thing to do, but the wide 
distribution of this weed is almost entirely due to the practice of 
allowing it to enter the soil with its betters. Once there, it is not 
an easy task to get it out again. It has a number of bad trait: 
which render it particularly obnoxious in grain fields: it thrives 
best under the field conditions best suited to the growth of cereals 
its seeds ripen irregularly, but usually before those of the grain 
with which it grows, and drop easily from the stalk as soon as ripe; 
the seeds have long vitality, and one fouling of the ground will last 
for several seasons. The plant adapts itself to the widest differ- 
