One of the worst was
goathead, easy to overlook because it grows low to the ground.
His favorites--pink spirals with openings as smooth as salamander mouths; ones with thirty, forty, up to fifty-three-and-a-half points; shapes that remind him of barbed wire buds and
goathead burrs and water swirling down a hole--he lines up on the mantle, so that he can see them from every corner of the cabin.
Sandburs are a real problem some places and so-called "
goathead" burrs are even worse.
APRIL 16 is
Goathead Day, so named to "celebrate the life events that cause us to ricochet off in a completety unexpected direction"--a la the goathead-vine thorns that gave Ed's bike the flat tire.
"Barefoot Through the
Goathead Patch: The Adventures of a Precocious Little Boy" is the story of a young boy through the challenges of youth and the first encounters with love, and facing the looming troubles of life ahead of him.
I appreciated Mike Quigley's (July 9) and Cliff Coles' (July 13) letters about the appearance here of the awful invasive weed
goathead, Tribulus terrestris, which can easily puncture a bike tire or a shoe.
In any case my efforts the first year were dismal and I ended up with a ton of kosha and
goathead weeds and very little else to show for all my back-breaking efforts!
In many parts of the far Midwest the sandbur creates a vicious obstacle course, along with another bad vegetative citizen, the
goathead bur.
To this day, I have recurring nightmares in which I am standing, with bare feet, in the middle of a
goathead patch and do not escape!
(That's what it was before white farmers.) Presently, expanding prairie patches exist amongst various lethal weeds (
goathead and sand burrs), hanger-on annual weeds, annual grasses, and tolerated tall-growing cool-season grasses.
It's commonly called a "puncturevine" or "
goathead." Google either term for a full description of the plant.