Plant ID help please - ragweed

I have approximately one billion of these:

What does it smell like? It looks a bit like a weedy common artemesia such as wormwood or mugwort. If a bruised leaf has a strong dusty-sweet smell, then I'd make that my guess.

Pretty sure with your location it will be common ragweed.

I have about 5 billion of them.....

John Weiland wrote:Pretty sure with your location it will be common ragweed.

I have about 5 billion of them.....

That looks right, thank you.  I also have giant ragweed, and I have about 10X as many of those.  I hit the ragweed lottery

Does it have a white tap root smells like a carrot and small white flowers forming an umbrella like disk. It looks like wild carrot or queen anns lace. Poison hemlock looks similar but larger. If you could take more pictures of the flowers stems and root.

No you guys didn't. I have this whatever it is and it's cousins aunts uncles and more all over my two acres. I think I have a few blooming ones, I'll try to snag a picture in the morning and add it here.

Ragweed. Not bad to pull out when young, but as it matures and flowers it seems to itch a bit, -which is caused by allergic reaction on exposed skin. A single plant can produce a billion spores and travel hundreds of miles. If you or neighbors have allergies, particularly nose related, get rid of it. I've never found any use for it, our animals have never eaten it, picked or live. --But, I haven't tried using it for paper making yet, so we'll see. In the absense of any other fact or opinion, in my opinion it's a nasty and unloved plant.

Jim Fry wrote:Ragweed. Not bad to pull out when young, but as it matures and flowers it seems to itch a bit, -which is caused by allergic reaction on exposed skin. A single plant can produce a billion spores and travel hundreds of miles. If you or neighbors have allergies, particularly nose related, get rid of it. I've never found any use for it, our animals have never eaten it, picked or live. --But, I haven't tried using it for paper making yet, so we'll see. In the absense of any other fact or opinion, in my opinion it's a nasty and unloved plant.

You can make paper out of it???  

Here I thought this stuff was ragweed....

Hey Deb, I have a million of those too.  They came in with the horse manure I brought in this year.

Matt Stahl wrote:Does it have a white tap root smells like a carrot and small white flowers forming an umbrella like disk. It looks like wild carrot or queen anns lace. Poison hemlock looks similar but larger. If you could take more pictures of the flowers stems and root.

I have those as well.  All over my yard and gardens.  It's weed-heaven at my house

Todd Parr wrote:

Matt Stahl wrote:Does it have a white tap root smells like a carrot and small white flowers forming an umbrella like disk. It looks like wild carrot or queen anns lace. Poison hemlock looks similar but larger. If you could take more pictures of the flowers stems and root.

I have those as well.  All over my yard and gardens.  It's weed-heaven at my house

You can't have weed heaven. I am in the dustbowl and we grow tumbleweeds, this has to be the weed capital of the universe. Only thing we do NOT have, is Kudzu. Yet. It could survive here. It may be on the way.

Todd: I also think your first plant is common ragweed. If so, it will have greenish flowers that reach for the sky on spikes. Both of my ragweeds flower at the same time as golden rod.
https://permaculturenews.org/2014/06/20/ragweed-curse-blessing-choice/

Deb: Common names can be confusing, as different locals use the same names for unrelated plants. I don't have your plant, but from hundreds of miles away, it looks kinda like an amaranth. My wild variety isn't pretty, and stays about 18 inches tall. Check this out.
http://www.eattheweeds.com/amaranth-grain-vegetable-icon/

Common names can be confusing, as different locations use the same names for different plants.
For example, take wild ginger that grows in the northern hemisphere is used like the tropical plant, but is botanially unrelated.
http://www.eattheweeds.com/wild-ginger/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedychium_gardnerianum

And then there are multiple plants called Hemp, that seem to all be used for fibers but many are not even related to marijuana, like sun hemp.

http://www.herbgarden.co.za/mountainherb/herbinfo.php?id=411

I got some pictures this morning of a possibly blooming ragweed.

I bet it is something artemisia. There are lots of artemisias. YOu can use them but how much do you need anyway?

Ambrosia (Artemisia, sage brush, mugwort, Artemis, common wormwood or what else you want to call it)

Hans J Brammer wrote:Ambrosia (Artemisia, sage brush, mugwort, Artemis, common wormwood or what else you want to call it)

Um ... all those are different plants. This is common ragweed which resembles artemisia but isn't. Sage brush doesn't look like this at all, it has long oval leaves that are fuzzy looking. Mugwort is smaller, different leaf shape.

On 5 acres I'm drowning in them. I've gone Rambo yanking them out even though its futile it feels great. There's a guy I follow on YouTube who wrote a book called compost your enemies and he throws weeds in a big bucket of water to make compost tea for his plants. They rot and die a slow stinky death and make great fertilizer. My hate for them began when I had a small fire that started from my smoker while I was working the beehives. It was a tiny little flame on a couple of pieces of dry grass. I ran for the garden hose but it got stuck on one of those ragweeds that was like a giant Oak tree and I was yanking and yanking and the hose wouldn't come free. Meanwhile, I'm watching a tiny little fire turn into a 10 foot radius flame that eventually burned down an acre. Firefighters had to be called and it took a ton of time to put the fire out. I was frantic and hysterical. I blame the Ragweed. And I'm going to kill them all. I need more buckets 😠

To my eye it looks mostly like common ragweed, but something still looks a bit off to me.

As for ragweed control, sheep are a good option.  Cows will eat it, but not entirely.  (They seem to love giant ragweed, though.)  A few years ago we had a handful of ram lambs that we rotationally grazed using electronet.  We had them processed in mid-August.  After they were gone and the electronet had been removed, you could see exactly where the sheep (and electronet) had been, as there was a solid line demarcating the "ragweed" part of the pasture from the "no ragweed" part.  The sheep had devoured all the ragweed inside their paddock.

The plant doctor at MWSU called it small ragweed. It seems that some call it common ragweed. The seeds have been used for protein and oil, but I have never tried it. I have pollen alergies and kill as many of the small and large ragweeds I can find, that grow at my place.

http://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/all-about-ragweed-the-good-and-the-bad#b

Could be common ragweed Ambrosia artemisiifolia, or could be tickseed bidens bipinnata. Leaves are extremely similar. Easiest way to know for certain is wait till it blooms. Both have uses, bidens is better and less allergy causing.