If you’ve ever wondered what the weeds are that are growing in your yard and garden you can learn about them and have a chance to win a ribbon.
ISU field agronomist Meaghan Anderson says the weed identification contest is back at the Iowa State Fair. They start with 20 common weeds for youth contestants, and make it more challenging for armature adults. “Plus ten that get a little bit harder or a little more unusual for weed species. And then our professionals will identify those first 30 and then they get five weeds at the end that are meant to be very challenging or very unusual weeds,” she says.
Anderson says they give the kids a little more leeway in the identification. “You’re supposed to answer, you know, a common name for the plant. And so for example, there’s a species called velvet leaf that we might accept velvet leaf, button weed, butter print, any number of common names. The judging is more strict for weed professionals.
“We may give youth partial credit for saying something is a foxtail, but the professional division they need to be able to say whether it was a yellow foxtail, a green foxtail, or a giant foxtail, for example,” she says.
Anderson says ISU Extension has some guides you can use to study up on weeds for the contest, as do some other universities. “But you can also just use apps or even books. So Iowa State has a weed ID guide that’s a small kind of handbook. And then there’s other more comprehensive books for weed identification. And apps can be a great place that’s a user-friendly tool for people to start,” she says. She says be sure you’re double checking what the app told you the identification was, because a lot of times there’s several species that may be very similar.
Anderson says they grow the weeds used for the contest, and the event itself causes her some anxiety. “Almost every year I worry that somebody will get a hundred percent because my goal is always that everybody learns something. And so nobody should get 100%,” Anderson says, “there should always be a new weed to learn, even for somebody who’s very well experienced and has been identifying these plants for a long time. And so, far, nobody has gotten 100 percent.” She says some have come very close to being perfect.
The Iowa State Fair weed judging contest is Friday, August 14th, from 9 to 11:30 a.m. in front of the Agriculture Building.
