Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
We’re having one of those summers where, when I close my eyes, all I see are snaking tendrils of goathead vines, dotted with those seemingly innocent tiny yellow flowers.
You’re not fooling me, Goatheads. I’m on to you.
While I have failed to crack Mother Nature’s code as to what conditions are necessary for a bumper crop of these spiky spreaders, I can say with certainty that we have hit on the ideal combination this year, as we do now and again.
Also known as puncture vine, the scientific name for goatheads is “tribulus terrestris.” That is Latin for “death to the bare foot.” Or something like that.
When my father stepped, shoeless, off of a train in Kenna as a toddler in 1915, he was welcomed to the Land of Enchantment by his first goathead plunging deep into his heel.
It was his earliest childhood memory, and was perhaps responsible in some subtle way for my own lifelong need to battle these insidious vines.
At first glance, goatheads don’t look so harmful. They grow low and quickly to cover disturbed ground, their dark green foliage sprinkled with sunny blossoms.
In another universe, perhaps they’d even be deliberately planted as ground cover and appreciated for their drought tolerance and perseverance.
If only they weren’t so prolific.
A single goathead can give birth to a sprawling tangle of vines up to 5 feet in diameter, and one that pretty much chokes out anything in its path.
While I’ve never had the patience to count this myself, various plant guides say that one plant can, under ideal conditions, produce 200 to … get this … 5,000 (that is five THOUSAND) bouncing baby goatheads.
Each of those is just waiting for the opportunity to be impaled in an unsuspecting foot or paw, or plunged deeply in the rubber of a passing tire. Regardless of mode, it gleefully hitchhikes to a new location (maniacally laughing all the way … no, really, I have heard them) where it will start all over again.
And if conditions aren’t quite right for growing that season, those darned goatheads have the patience of saints and can wait as long as five years (some sources say up to 10 years) to have their thorny season in the sun.
If only they were a money crop, I’d be laughing all the way to the bank this summer.
Instead, I’m pulling on my gloves and heading back to my shovel and wheelbarrow. Daylight is wasting and the enemy is gaining on me.
If you don’t hear from me soon, please check under the goathead vines.
Betty Williamson loves nature, but not when it makes her bleed. Reach her at:
