Small Detour today. I just wanted to remind everyone that there’s new content on Hubriscomics every day. The comic strips are on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but every other day has something that you must scroll down the page for, and is archived in the various Sidebar Subjects: Play Nice, Talk About Toys, Lies Around the Campfire, and as in the case of this horrible scary plant- Dirty Pictures. I don’t want anyone thinking that it’s not worth scrolling down the page or missing out on the sidebar items- the funny ones or the useful ones- just because they’re not comic strips. Explore and Enjoy- then go outside and play. Though you may want gloves.
This is Knap Weed. Very dirty plant. It’s exotic to North America and has taken over the road sides and many pasture lands. It releases a toxin in the soil that prevents the native plants from growing. It is also terribly uncomfortable to walk through and ride trough because it covers the trails and has little tiny pricklers on it.
As an addendum to Jeff’s comments about Knap Weed- Have you seen the Coen Brothers’ version of True Grit? Rooster Cogburn has some wonderful lines in that film, but one that I enjoyed quite a bit was this about Texas:
“There ain’t but about six trees between there and Canada, and nothing else grows but has stickers on it.”
I love the different descriptors people have for plants that poke holes in you, and I have ridden across the part of the country that Rooster’s talking about there. Pricklers, Stickers, Thorns, Spines, Prickers, Spikelets, Barbs, You name it, I don’t like ’em. I’ll have more to say on the subject as the ‘Grand Canyon Diary’ in ‘Lies Around The Campfire‘ trips along.
In 1986, my buddy, Harald from Sweden, fell into a briar patch and yelled, “Stitches! Stitches!”
In the heat of the moment, he inadvertently replaced “stickers” with “stitches”. At first, we thought he was yelling for us to take him in to the hospital for a sewing up.