🌿 Weed
ANX-WEED-0000250
Lambsquarters
Chenopodium album
Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), an annual broadleaf weed of the Amaranthaceae family.
- Family
- Amaranthaceae
- Growth habit
- Broadleaf
- Life cycle
- Annual
- Invasive status
- Naturalized, widespread
- Native region
- Eurasia, now cosmopolitan/naturalized on every continent except Antarctica.
- Reproduction
- Seed - prolific seed producer (up to 100,000+ per plant) with a mealy grey coating on young leaves.
Environment
Habitat & Growing Conditions
- Habitat
- Cultivated land, gardens, roadsides, disturbed soil.
- Climate requirements
- Very wide climatic tolerance from temperate to tropical.
- Soil types
- Prefers fertile, nitrogen-rich soils but tolerates most soil types.
Impact
Crops Affected & Economic Impact
- Affected crops
- Maize, sugar beet, potato, beans, vegetable crops
- Competition impact
- Fast early growth competes strongly with young crop seedlings for light, water, and nutrients.
- Economic impact
- One of the world's most common agricultural weeds, found in nearly every temperate cropping system.
Management
Control Methods
- Control methods
- Early cultivation, mulching, and dense crop canopies that shade out seedlings.
- Organic control
- Hand weeding or hoeing while young (it is also edible and can be harvested as a leaf vegetable rather than only destroyed).
- Chemical control
- Pre-emergent soil-applied herbicides and post-emergent broadleaf herbicides; some populations show triazine resistance.