Before and After
Before and After

Many weed control products require basic knowledge of the type of weeds that invade our gardens. But how many of us are on a first name basis with our garden invaders? Knowing nothing more than how irritating it is to keep pulling and re-pulling and so on, I decided to do more research.

HELP ME!

If you my dear reader are an expert on weed identification, please do comment.  I’d appreciate any help with knowing what’s growing in my garden.

Although at this point I’m not 100% sure, here a list of weeds I believe to be growing in my Okinawa garden:

Possible Common Plantain

Some Kinda Clover

  • LESSER TREFOIL (aka Little Hop Clover or Yellow Suckling Clover)

Garden Weeds-6491

Dandelion Seed Head
Dandelion Seed Head - Which are still beautiful to me. Weed or No?!

My assumptions are based on our hard and heavy clay soil. Researching soil type and cross referencing pictures helped narrow down the weed results.

The problem is that we live in Okinawa, Japan.  I’m not able to find too many weeds specific to Asia.  Maybe it’s because I cannot read Kanji or that weeds are the same no matter where they grow.

Either way, it’s not a big deal, the weeds are gone now and it’s time to add compost to the soil.  Moving on…

An Update on this post:

As I am publishing and adding tags for this post I came across Flora of the RyuKyus.  At a later date I will have to research each one of these listed to see any difference between what I’ve found here and what is proven to grow in our subtropical environment.

Thank you WordPress for throwing facts in my face, after I searched for hours.  Entering in multiple word combinations and coming up short of information on weed growth in Okinawa.  (Poor key word/ tagging I suppose.)

Research and blogging is DONE for the day.  I’m heading out for some dirt digging and sunshine. 🙂

Here’s a few links I found immediately after searching for weed types and identify weeds:

Landscaping.about.com

GrowingAnything.com

GardeningKnowHow.com

You can tell it’s spring by the sheer number of  garden weeding articles out there floating around in the blogspace right now.  I couldn’t help but link to a bunch, and yes I read almost all of them and yes I found some very helpful information from my fellow garden bloggers.
Thank you and Good Luck to all of you this season.
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