amaranth?

peas? beans?

black-eyed pea?

Datura stramonium
Pigweed
Soybeans
?

third pic looks like what henry ford made famous.. the soybean ... couple million acres of such in my lenawee county thx to him .. ... but i am no farmer.. nor botanist ...

ken

Duplicate post

This post was edited by sweet_betsy on Wed, Oct 23, 13 at 7:51

The datura and amaranth are common weeds which can be found at the edges of my pasture ... which before me was horse pasture. Before that it was part of just a few acres plowed for some crop(s) no one has ever named. And before that it was a small apple orchard underplanted with clover and strawberries (strawberries are still to be found here and there, several decades after the trees were cut down).

And the soybeans are undoubtedly descendants of a prior crop in that one field.

Why do certain plants predominate? It would have to do with when their seeds sprout (after the farmer has plowed, then planted his pumpkins) and how well they can compete with the pumpkins (one factor would be their ability to grow above the shade of the pumpkin foliage).

Apparently the datura and amaranth compete better than other weeds: or maybe it's just that they're more noticeable than the other weeds: amaranth can be well over 6', and datura has large leaves and a characteristic branch structure ... besides the nasty spiked fruit. (There were probably other weeds more numerous, but less large and attention-attracting. I can see grass and clover in the first photo, but the OP didn't remark on those.)

If the datura and amaranth aren't to be found in the soybean field, it may be that years of planting soybeans there (Roundup Ready soybeans, perhaps?) killed them off. It may also have something to do with soybeans being mechanically-cultivated more often than pumpkins.

Thanks everyone for your input! You are, of course, all correct!

Missing, I didn't mean to imply that no other weeds grew there...there was also quite a bit of smartweed. It's just that the amaranth and pigweed seemed out of place, i.e. not present in the adjacent (soybean) field or in the "scrubby" farmland on the other side pumpkin patch that I could see. It "seemed" to be confined to the pumpkin patch! I understand what you mean about the soybean field....I was thinking they might have been grown organically....wishful thinking I guess...

Organic soybeans? Extremely unlikely they're even non GMO.