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The Weeds of Baltimore City

Last fall my cat would continue to come into the house with the darndest things stuck on him. Every varity of kling-on, stick-ums, barb and burr that you can imagine was on this cat. Many times all at once. One time he did nearly pull the table cloth off the table upon walking past a dangling corner. This provoked my wife and I to clear a vacant lot behind our house to curtail this onslot. I could spend fourty-five minutes picking these things off of our pathetic looking pet each day. This spring I resolved to learn somthing about all these weeds. This is My report. I have been about gardens for quiet a while but I don't have the habit of reaching for the herbicide very often, so at the age of fourt-two I thought I should bone up on that as well.

There are so many types of weeds near my house it threatened to be overwelming, so I decided to single one out and atack them each upon identifing them. Now I'm a yankee seacoast boy, grown up in New Bedford Massachusetts. I have a good familiarity with salt marshes, Northeast mixed forests and some of the agricuture of that area; cranberry bogs, corn fields , apple orchards, etc. I have been a few places too El Paso desert, Savana river, Germany and Spain, but many of these things I have never seen. So I am on a learning curve here.

The first target for identification is a stemlike thing with whorls of small thin leaves five to eight in number at every four inches. This plant has fine hooked hairs on all surfaces. It is called Bedstraw or Cleaver and sometimes Goosegrass the scientific name is --