What are these new weeds that popped up recently?

[yardiron]

This resembles rose bushes but it never turns woody, but has flat wide thorns like a rose bush, but it don't seem to fruit or flower. It grows in clumps similar to how forsythia grows.
The leaves are also prickly. It popped up recently in various areas around the yard.

This one resembles rose but has no flowers or fruit, never gets above maybe knee high.

This stuff has been popping up all around the shrubs and house, it gets about 6ft tall in a hurry and develops a rather large stem at the base that's impossible to pull out. I dug one up and the roots are a knotty ball with long runners. It has no thorns, no berries, and no flowers. It grows in clusters.

Some type of grass, it stays light green, grows similar to a corn stalk. It grows fast even in tilled soil. It has very shallow roots, even if left to grow, it can be pulled out with little to no effort
Its become a constant hassle in the vegetable garden.

This one has always been here, it grows everywhere,. The leaves are thin and almost grass like and the brown tops are seeds. It grows ten times as fast a grass and thrives when nothing else will. It unaffected by Roundup, Trimec, and even Triox. It survived the four weeks of no rain and 99 degree weather when the rest of the lawn did not. Its deeply rooted and impossible to pull out without leaving the roots. I've taken a shovel to each clump, dug out a full spade shovel around it and replaced that dirt with new dirt but it returns.

Does anyone know what these four weeds are and what kills them?

The rose looking thorny stuff is growing in among my yew bushes and I don't want to kill those.

 

[roadrunner]

The third picture looks like Yellow Nutsedge.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

I am on a different continent, so most weeds will be different, but it might be worth checking out wood rush for the third one down.
EDIT> Just realised roadrunner is talking about the same thing, sedges and rushes are pretty similar, he probably has it.

 

[yardiron]

The third picture looks like Yellow Nutsedge.

Yellow nutsedge grows from a rhisome this stuff grows individually with almost no roots, even where its not been pulled out and let grow, it never has a strong root base, the roots are totally on the surface, a metal rake pretty much sweeps it away but just grasping a fist full of them just lifts it out of the garden.
The individual plants never 'clump up' like most grass, it stays a single stem shooting off two to four blades off the side and those blades get up to about a foot tall before bending over and touching the ground. It never darkens in color it stays the same light green color. A plant left to mature also doesn't gain any girth with the main stem only being the sum of all its blades and never more.
It does not 'fill in' between plants either, it remains sparse with 4-6 inches between plants.
What I find odd is that its only popping up in the tilled soil and around the gutter spouts off the roof. There is none of it in the open lawn, and none even in open areas behind the garage where there is no grass growing.
In the vegetable garden, if left be where you walk, nothing else sprouts around it. It seems to out compete crab grass, chickweed, and a few others common weeks that I've had to deal with in past years.
I've planted this garden now for about 22 years with a few years missed off and on for soil recovery what ever this is its new, I've never had this here before. It also grows super fast going from emergent to 6" in a day and hitting 12" in three to four days even in dry periods.

Its the only weed that's in the vegetable garden. In years past I had issues with millet, which was spread by folks buying cheap bird seed. At first I thought it was more millet coming up but its rooted differently and never fills in as millet does. Millet also comes up as individual blades but this stuff shoots up as three blades off the center from the start.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

I've planted this garden now for about 22 years with a few years missed off and on for soil recovery what ever this is its new, I've never had this here before.

That struck me as strange, like it could be a recent escape. Found a New Jersey horticultural society that publishes a list of 50 common local weeds, couldn't see it there. Worth getting in touch with them perhaps?

 

[Mrsclem]

first one looks like a variety of multiflora rose. Considered a weed in most areas.
#2- possible elm
#4- narrow leaf plaintain. Seen way too much of that!

 

[yardiron]

first one looks like a variety of multiflora rose. Considered a weed in most areas.
#2- possible elm
#4- narrow leaf plaintain. Seen way too much of that!

I think your right on #4. It looks like a dead on match.

I hadn't thought about Elm but there is a massive 150 ft tall tree that was identified as a 'Slippery Elm' that covers the area with small eye shaped seed pods every spring.
What don't fit is that the shoots I keep getting aren't something that seems to be turning into a tree, they tend to be cluster of small stems that spread. It grows much the way forsythia does and never a singular trunk as a tree would have.

At first I thought it was a series of re-emergent plants or a reaction to the neighbor removing that hedge row and leaving some of the root behind.

With that one tree being the only real sample here of Elm, I can't say I've seen what young elm tree sprouts look like and sort of figured that since its a lone tree, it wasn't producing fertile seeds because they never sprouted up everywhere like the maple and sycamore trees do.

Can an elm tree take the form of a bush or cluster of stems?


I had thought about multiflora rose but these things have wide flat thorns much like regular roses. We do have something here that most call wild rose but that has very common looking pink rose flowers on it rather consistently.
The detailed pics online of multiflora rose show small round thorns not the wide, somewhat hooked thorns this has.
The thorns seem to mature as it grows, the newest growth is meerly prickly but soon turns into a leg ripping mess. Even the leaves have prickly edges that leave tiny thorns in your fingers if your not careful.

 

[roadrunner]

Yellow nutsedge grows from a rhisome this stuff grows individually with almost no roots, even where its not been pulled out and let grow, it never has a strong root base, the roots are totally on the surface, a metal rake pretty much sweeps it away but just grasping a fist full of them just lifts it out of the garden.
The individual plants never 'clump up' like most grass, it stays a single stem shooting off two to four blades off the side and those blades get up to about a foot tall before bending over and touching the ground. It never darkens in color it stays the same light green color. A plant left to mature also doesn't gain any girth with the main stem only being the sum of all its blades and never more.
It does not 'fill in' between plants either, it remains sparse with 4-6 inches between plants.
What I find odd is that its only popping up in the tilled soil and around the gutter spouts off the roof. There is none of it in the open lawn, and none even in open areas behind the garage where there is no grass growing.
In the vegetable garden, if left be where you walk, nothing else sprouts around it. It seems to out compete crab grass, chickweed, and a few others common weeks that I've had to deal with in past years.
I've planted this garden now for about 22 years with a few years missed off and on for soil recovery what ever this is its new, I've never had this here before. It also grows super fast going from emergent to 6" in a day and hitting 12" in three to four days even in dry periods.

Its the only weed that's in the vegetable garden. In years past I had issues with millet, which was spread by folks buying cheap bird seed. At first I thought it was more millet coming up but its rooted differently and never fills in as millet does. Millet also comes up as individual blades but this stuff shoots up as three blades off the center from the start.

Yes, it spreads a lot from rhizomes, but it does reseed itself and the seedling forms a "nut" (actually a little tuber). When you pull the weed out of the ground, chances are you will only get the shallow roots, because the tuber is anchored in the ground and it will produce new foliage.

Yellow Nutsedge is not a grass, despite having a similar appearance, it's a Sedge. If you dig it out of the soil, you should be able to see the tuber AKA "Nut".

 

[yardiron]

I found some pics of yellow nut sedge plants out of the ground and they don't resemble what I have at all.
The pics online at Rutgers shows the bottom of the plant sort of resembling the white end of wild garlic or green onion with long white roots. When I pull up this stuff its got a short bushy dark colored root ball with a bunch of fine surfaced roots.

I took a few that I pulled up over to the farm research lab for this county and the girl there seemed to think its something in the barley family. They kept the samples to get a proper answer.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

There was a row of elm trees next door when I was a kid, they used to put up loads of suckers, but they were mature trees.

 

[yardiron]

Elm trees here have been pretty much extinct for years, Dutch Elm Disease killed them all off long ago. Those that remain are variations of Elm and that huge Slippery Elm is the only one I've seen anywhere around here. The one neighbor wanted to take it down but it borders on two properties and the other one got it registered as a protected tree so they can't touch it. It has to be 12ft around the base. If it ever fell, it would take out a half dozen houses or lay across that many back yards here.
It drops millions of half inch long eye shaped seeds that fly like mini helicopters when they break free every April. They cover the entire neighborhood but I've never found a tree sprouting. If these things I've got here are some sort of elm, then I wonder if or how they go from a green whip like bush to a tree.

The plant in question is also much lighter in color and they never seem to get any larger than about 5ft tall and are super fast growing, it only takes it a few weeks to go from a sprout to 5ft tall. They grow fast. Most trees don't advance that fast and most trees don't remain green and flexible at that height.
The one pictured above popped up since last week, its doubled in size since I posted that pic.

 

[nemodot]

second picture is an Elm tree.

 

[yardiron]

Do elm trees start out as a bunch of clustered branches out of one root?
Most of these things are in clumps of many whip like stems that grow FAST. If I chop them off below the ground, they grow back in a matter of few days and in a week their eye level laying over in all directions.
I tried pulling the roots out but can never get hold of all of them, they run horizontally like long runners to the next plant. There's a deep tap root beneath every sprout and one or two runners that are close to the surface. They remind me of how forsythia grows but with the tenacity of Wisteria without the climbing vines. It seems to grown in places where its hard to get at to remove. Either right against the foundation, under the hedges, in among the azalea plants, or back behind the garage where it often don't get noticed till its 6ft tall. Its even made its way though between the sheathing on one shed growing up the back corner but with almost white leaves due to the lack of sun. It exited again near the roof and is again green there. I soaked it in round up where its rooted under the shed but it didn't nothing to either the leaves or the stem. I then tried Triox and that only made spots on the leaves where it was sprayed but it continued to grow.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

Elm trees put out suckers, because they are drawing energy from the tree they can grow very fast, they come in bunches. The thing that doesn't fit for me is that I would expect them close around the tree. One possibility is that the tree hs been felled in some way and is no longer there, but the root system is.

 

[yardiron]

The only elm tree I've ever known around here is still there, my range finder says its 132ft tall, but its hard to tell. The guy who used to live down there used to have a tree stand in that tree ad even in the deer stand the first leaves and branches were more than double that distance up the tree.
It borders two properties, one neighbor wanted to cut it down about 10 years ago, the other didn't so they fought it out and the one guy got it properly identified and was told its called a 'Slippery Elm'. by someone at Rutgers here and there was something special about its type that they deemed it protected.

Every spring, its one of the first trees to seed, and it covers the whole neighborhood in tiny eye shaped seed propellers. The number of seeds it dumps is massive but there's never been any signs of any that sprouted. '

The yard next door had a row of bushes the surrounded their property, back in 2004 the new owners ripped out all the bushes and trees on in that yard and put up a wooden fence and a sod lawn. I could swear one of the bushes in that hedge row looked like these things here. there's even some shooting up on my side of that fence near where that bush was. But I've never had them all over the yard before like this, they're on all sides of my house, in the bushes, in the hedge row, in among my forsythia bushes, and behind my garage.

The elm tree down there has darker leaves, maybe even smaller, when we get a storm I get some falling over this way and they're only a couple inches long, these sprouts have larger, lighter green leaves.
There is also the possibility that huge slippery elm tree is not the source either.
There's been a few houses sold and yards renovated lately and lots of trees taken out but none were very close, all were 5 properties down or more.

I grew up around here and most of these houses were all original owners who I grew up with in the 60's and 70's. I knew most all these yards either from growing up with their kids, or doing yard work as a teen for them. I don't remember any other elm trees. This area is loaded with Norway Maple, Sycamore, swamp maple, cedar, and dogwood trees. There also used to be a ton of huge fir trees but a storm came through in 2012 and toppled every one of them. There also used to be Mimosa trees, and crepe myrtle trees but those all died off too. Now we're loosing the dogwood trees to fungus and moss. I've got one of the last one's left and I doubt it's got much longer to go, its been dying off a little at a time for the last 10 years.

Another weed we constantly fight here is Tree of Heaven. Those things grow fast and pop up everywhere constantly. I have one to cut down out back now that popped up out of no where last month and is already 12ft tall growing out of the middle of my fig bush.