"Clean Up On Aisle..."

Sunday was a coolish, windy day, but Cindy decided to struggle out into the yard to tackle the
Wild Cucumber vine that was contending with the remains of the Eugenia hedge for world domination.

Since she's been fighting off the effects of an infected tooth for the past week, I didn't expect her to be outside for very long.  When I went out to see how things were going, she had removed the vine and some other weeds in the area, although she hadn't yet found the location of the "man root" of the Wild Cucumber.

When she still hadn't come back in after a couple of hours, I went back outside and discovered that she had continued chopping back the Eugenia and the Thumbergia all along the side of the house.

It needed to be done, but that's a lot of work.

Just In Time

Cindy finally uprooted the Wild Cucumbers we had sprouted from the seeds some critter had stashed in one corner of the raised vegetable bed.

Wild Cucumber Uprooted

It looks like we were just in time; the root on this thing is enormous for the size of the plant.  It's pretty clear that the plant puts most of its energy into building the fibrous root before the leaves sprout, but once it gets the root going, the plant grows at an incredible rate.

Since we identified the plant, we've seen others growing up through a dead tree in the neighbor's yard, and also seen it climbing up our Lemonadeberry shrubs behind our hedge.  There must be a huge root somewhere out there in the canyon.

When Cindy mentioned this to some of her Master Gardener friends yesterday, they couldn't believe that we had intentionally sprouted seeds without knowing what the plant was.  Won't do that again, but at least we sprouted them in containers and kept it from establishing that root in the ground.

It's pretty clear that this plant could challenge both the Eugenia and the Thunbergia for world domination.

Ominous Signs From The Mystery Nuts

Mystery Nuts Finally Sprout

The mystery nuts that we discovered in the corner of one of the raised beds in February (see Whose Nuts?) have finally sprouted and are showing signs of being something we really don't want in the yard.

The leaves look like ivy leaves and the plant is starting to throw out tendrils that look like it's going to be a vine of some kind.  Neither of those characteristics is desirable, but I've never heard that ivy produced nuts.

Mystery Nuts

The nuts we found looked almost like acorns, but without the top cap that acorns have.  They were about the size and shape of pecans.  Nuts?  Seeds?  Whatever they were, they were quite pretty, but we're definitely not interested in anything that sends out vines like that.

Several years ago we had a wild California Cucumber vine crawl up out of the canyon and shoot along the fence on the north side of our backyard.  It grew incredibly fast and produced the characteristic spiny green fruit that vaguely resembles a cucumber.  (O. K., it's a large green fruit, but that's about as close as the resemblance gets to a real cucumber).  The fruit is actually the seed pod that contains the seeds. According to one source, rodents and Scrub Jays like to cache the seeds, although what use they make of the seeds is unknown, since all parts of the plant are reputed to be very bitter.  Tasting the fruit can apparently lead to numbness of the tongue and jaw.  My brother tasted one of the fruits on a biology field trip in high school and experienced the numbness.

The bad news is that the Marah macrocarpus species is also called "Man Root" because of the large underground tubers that keep the plant alive during the dry season.  One of the roots reportedly weighed over 400 pounds.  During the dry season the plant just goes dormant and waits for the next rainy season, when the vines emerge again and grow up and over trees, shrubs and fences to suck up as many nutrients as possible.

More identification is available at the UC Integrated Pest Management Website and it looks a whole like what we've got growing in those cups.  The ground squirrels are the most likely suspects to have cached the seeds, but with skunks, raccoons and Scrub Jays visiting the yard, it could have been any of them.

I'm thinking we need to pull these things up pronto--we know we've already got one of these plants living nearby and we certainly don't need any more of them.