 Hi, I'm Greg Endress. I work as an extension agronomist at the Carrington Research Extension Center and I'm standing in our living weed exhibit at the center. It has about 60 live weeds that are available for viewing anytime and the reason we have this display is because the first step in weed management is weed identification. Today I'm going to talk about about half of the North Dakota noxious weeds that are on our list. There's several weeds that I will not talk about. Of the 13 they include Canada thistle, musthistle, absinthe wormwood, leafy spurge, purple loose strife and salt cedar. But we'll talk briefly about the rest of these seven weeds and we'll be talking about their biology and primarily just some basic identification characteristics. If you want details about this weeds we have a very nice guide to North Dakota noxious and troublesome weeds and then also we do have the North Dakota weed control guide to give you tools to help manage these difficult to control weeds. So let's begin. I like to start with the three napweeds in North Dakota and the napweeds are our perennials. The Russian napweed which is here is a long live perennial. The other two the diffuse napweed, the spotted napweed are short live perennials or sometimes even our biennials. With a Russian napweed it has a very extensive root system. The root system can reach down to 20 feet and it also has a characteristic that helps distinguish it from the other two napweeds. It has a blackened surface on the roots so if a person pulls the plant out you can see it has extensive root system which is different than the other two napweeds plus that blackened approach to it. On the top side of all three of these napweeds there's a fairly easy way to distinguish them and that is looking at their bracts. The bracts are the structures that surround the flower of these three napweeds and so essentially to distinguish the three of them we need to wait until they flower to be sure that they're one or the other. And with the Russian napweed it has kind of a paper-like tip to the bracts as compared to the others. With diffuse napweed we have spines that surround the tip of the brack which distinguish it from the others. And then with spotted napweed as the name applies it has a blackened tip on the bracts. So the bracts are the key way to distinguish our three napweeds. And all three of these are very difficult to control. Next let's talk about toled flax. There's actually two toled flax species that are on the North Dakota Noxious Weed List. The one we have on display today is the yellow toled flax. And both yellow toled flax and Dalmatian toled flax are perennials. They are reproduced by the Ritz system as well as by seed production. Yellow toled flax if you on a casual look of it it looks like it's leafy spurge. But in closer inspection you'll see that the leaves are narrower and longer. And a key way to identify it is that if you pull the leaves or break the stem there will not be any milky sap that is seen as compared to leafy spurge. So how do we distinguish between yellow toled flax and Dalmatian? Well Dalmatian toled flax has arrow shaped leaves that wrap around a woody stem as compared to what we've seen here with the yellow toled flax. More of a thin stem and as I mentioned earlier the leaves are long and narrow. Both of these two are long-lived perennials that are very difficult to control. They're in the snap dragon family and they're actually escaped ornamentals. And then we have two left that I want to talk about and both of these are new entries relatively new entries in our Noxious Weed List. The first is houndstong. Houndstong is a biennial and it spreads by seed. The first year of growth looks like these plants here. The leaves can get to a length of six to eight inches and they have kind of an ovate shape to them and the leaf surfaces is full of hairs and is rough feeling. And that's part of the reason that it was named houndstong. The second year of growth the chute will elongate and about this time of year the flowers will be present and the flowers will produce three to four nutlets that are tear drop shaped flat and they have these spines or burrs on them that easily can be transported primarily by animals, wildlife as well as man. So that is houndstong. And then the last one is palmer amaranth. And of course we don't have that on display because it's our most feared pigweed, many pigweeds that we have in North Dakota. With palmer amaranth it most closely resembles water hemp and that both of these pigweeds will lack hairs. But to distinguish palmer from water hemp the petioles are quite a bit longer. They're typically are longer than the length of the leaves and the petiol is a structure that connects the leaves to the stem. Palmer amaranth is a very prolific seed producer and when the seed head emerges it'll be very long. It will be at least a foot long and sometimes they can grow to two to three feet in length. And so that's something different compared to the other pigweeds in North Dakota. Palmer amaranth is what we call dietius. So there's some male plants and female plants and the male plants that are headed the head is soft as compared to the female palmer amaranth when you when you grab the head it is bristly. In addition the female palmer amaranth will have very sharp spikes in the leaf axle. So it's a really quick rundown on palmer amaranth. We have a very nice guy that talks about our our worst pigweeds in the state, how to identify them as well as control measures. But at this point we're trying to keep a palmer amaranth eradicated for North Dakota.