A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2007 What am I?

It just popped up one day..


Meg

A very quick guess ,
either a Sumac or Black Walnut???

Weezie

You mean, this weed lookin thing could grow into a tree?? Hmm.. it's right behind my house, almost up next to it. I'm not so sure that's the best place it should be, if that's the case.

Meg

My guess is also Walnut... easy way to ID Walnut is that it has chambered pith. Take a small twig slice it along its length if the pith has membranes creating small chambers its a Walnut! Good luck.

That is definately a tree! It is in my mystery plant section on webshots and I believe weezie told me what it is...can't remember tho. But, like yours, it just popped up one day. I must have around 15 coming up around my house. I keep pulling them out...we have enough trees! But I've been looking around at the trees around the area we live in and these things get HUGE!!!! I didn't start pulling them up until I saw how big they get!

I wonder if I dig it up, can I move it to another part of my yard... away from the side of the house. I mean, it's growing right now about 6" from the outside wall! I don't need my house to go all Jumanji with a tree pushing thru the wall..lol.

Meg

No you don't want a Walnut growing that close to your house!! YIKES
The first year it's growing they aren't toooo hard to pull out and transplant, but after that, the tap root is quite loooooooong and then when you cut it off and you think you killed it,
it'll re~sprout next year and each year after that!!!

They are magnificant trees if you have the space for them!! The green sticky balls can be a bit messy too, we have several between all the property lines here in town...
I had about 100 of them a couple of years ago in my compost, I was pregnant and fall time the baby was due, I could mow the lawn and use the sweeper but for taking those piles and putting them into my compost was not in the program, so the piles sat there that winter, in the spring time, no lie, I had about 100 trees sprouting there, I called a friend of mine that owns a tree farm and said, "Have I got a deal for you!!!" He took about 70 of them, and I left them, thinking he'd come back for the rest, well, he didn't and the roots are still viable...

Weezie

So, um.. I guess I should go out there now and see if I can get it up ok..lol. I gotta take some pics for ya now, I think it's grown more!!

Meg

Ok, so I did that.. I took pics, then I dug it up, then I took more pics..lol. We went out to dinner.. we were treated by a friend from out of town "on the company's dime". I had a couple shots of Southern Comfort, and I feel fiiiiine right now. I haven't done that in a looooong time. Anyways, here's some photos for ya.

I think I'll split this into a couple posts, these pics are kinda big..

First, this is where the tree was growing, all on it's own...

Then, I had to dig pretty deep!



And here it is in another part of the yard, not up alongside the house...




Meg

We got that all over the place. Full grown ones too - that last picture - looks like the sumac we have.