Tumbleweeds Are Invading The U.S. And It's A Real Problem - Cheddar Explains
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ม.ค. 2025
- In film, it usually goes something like this: Two cowboys are in a standoff on opposite sides of a deserted town road. All is quiet, and a brown tangle of weeds rolls across the screen, kicking up dust and cutting the tension. The tumbleweed would seem a background actor here - quiet, benign, and quickly off screen. The clear danger is whichever weapon the cowboys are carrying. But in reality, it’s the tumbleweed you should watch out for.
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As a European I have to admit, that I've never seen one...
As an American, I have also never seen one
As a Russian I've never seen neither Tumbleweed nor Russian Thistle
@@MaF1e Maybe it's too cold? 🥶
A European*
@@Gamer-qv5rc Thanks
I saw tumbleweeds lining the road on the highway in Colorado once. My initial impression was that it was a big giant dead bush until I realized it's just a mass of smaller tumbleweeds.
As someone who lives in tumbleweed country, sees them regularly, and finds them kind of annoying (because, like deer, they can just pop out from the ditch and, if you drive over them, they can get caught under the car, and occasionally get stuck against the exhaust where they burn) I find it kind of funny that people will collect and sell them online to people in areas that don’t have them to be used as decoration. I’ve seen them covered in glitter and propped up and decorated like Christmas trees.
So... Invasive plant? It's bamboo all over again...
As a european this is funny to me. Its a real novelty. I used to have a rose of jericho, which is similar. Cant these mountains of weed be collected and compressed for firewood?
christ
@@nutzeeer furniture, there is a company in vietnam that use straw mix with glue compress and turn into board, similar to mdf
Which is stupid
CGP Grey covered this topic years ago. His tumbleweed videos are still fun to watch.
THE HUMBE TUMBLE!!!!
Love Grey
My authority all things tumble
The Trouble with Tumbles
"Something that breaks away from it's roots and is driven about by the wind as a light rolling mass scattering seeds as it goes." That's a perfect definition of my cousin.
That tumbleweed presence in California was baby food compared to how it goes down in the southern front range of Colorado every year. The dude "swimming" through tumbleweeds at his front door was swimming through a different plant, it was not russian thistle, hence why he was able to walk through it without getting scratched up. At the end the dude recommended plowing through tumbleweed jams but I can tell you for a fact that you can break your headlights that way because it happened to me lol. Russian thistle isn't soft at all and it is the worst of all tumbleweeds.
Kochia can also form tumbleweeds
He actually said to avoid them as if avoiding an animal due to them exploding on impact.
From Russia, with love.
@@isaaclang6031 😆😆😆💣🤯
I lived in el paso for 5 years. I hate tumble weeds. I had a massive one that was like 5 foot tall in my yard. It was there in my backyard for weeks. So one day I decided to burn it along with a dead Christmas tree. One flick of the lighter and it was gone in 20-25 foot flames. Unfortunately the fire station could see the flames and they rushed down to me. When they arrived The fire department captain and his crew invaded my backyard with a crazy look on their face. They explained that 1. You cant burn anything in el paso in your backyard. 2. It looked as though my house was on fire from their point of view. The fire was so fast they didn't even have to let me finish burning it was all gone by the time they bust in.
Very courageous of you to set that on fire!. It should be viewd as a resource, burn it controlled for energy, or use in composting. But you have to crush it first and that looks like impossible without a special machine.
@Ally Hauptmann-Gurski I would have used it for something but unfortunately my house was central air and my house was located in the desert. I had no time to even try to garden so fire it was lol.
Was wondering with all their thorn also scratched the car?
@@evelynshaw3932 oh yea when they hit your car while driving down purple heart or Montana they scratch the crap out of your car
@@chasingthefish9042 So I'm wondering if it could be shredded in a container on a truck and burned to wood ash for gardening? They could maybe sell it? as fire wood too?
CGP GREY HAS A VIDEO ABOUT IT, THESE THINGS ARE ....CRAZY BAD FOR FARMING!
THE HUMBLE TUMBLE!!!
WHY ARE WE YELLING?
Driving through Texas and New Mexico I saw SO many of these and was actually excited to see them! I had only seen them in movies. But I didn't realize they were such a problem 😳
Lived in New Mexico in the mid 70s. When the March winds blew, tumbleweeds would stack 6 feet high against the front door of our ground floor apartment. It was a real chore getting past them to get to work in a suit and tie.
The problem with just driving through a bunch of piled up tumbleweeds on a roadway is... there may be other vehicles stopped and hidden by the pile, other obstacles, or even wildlife using the pileup as cover while they travel from place to place. Single, or a just a few lone tumblers- sure- drive through them (but expect lots of debris in your grill and stuck on your undercarriage). Big pile you can't see over or around? That's where the hidden dangers may be.
That wouldn't stop MY neighbor, he does 60 in dense fog!
Never heard a single story in my life of this being a problem.
Tumbleweeds are a call sign of drought or very dry conditions. More drought means more tumbleweeds.
Incorrect, most tumbleweeds are present in arid places. As a majority of the species have a mechanism to detach from their roots, roll in the wind and spread seeds. Drought has nothing to do with it, these types of plants can grow almost anywhere. Some are even edible.
Some tumbleweeds can get big, like almost the size of a small car. I was almost sideswiped by one in Eastern-Central Washington that was as big as my ‘02 Dodge Neon I was driving
Same here. I was driving my toyota corolla in yakima and I got side swiped by a tumbleweed as large as my car. Fortunately it didn't do serious damage, and there was no traffic that day.
When I first moved to WA state there was a news story/alert saying to be aware of the "radioactive" tumbleweeds - they were close to a nuclear power plant
Sounds like something out of a bad Sci Fi movie..
When was that, in the 80s?! As a Washingtonian, that doesnt live far from the Hanford plant, ive never heard of said warning.
I'm in Palmdale California not far from victorville.. yes tumbleweeds are a MAJOR problem... they won't go away.. no matter how many are removed
I wish they would’ve shown the tumbleweed explosion he was talking about at the end!
They don't explode like a bomb, they're very brittle and when hit, they scatter like a bag of leaves.
Tumbleweeds remind me of Tribbles from Star Trek...
Or the crystalline entity...
In one of the Little House books their hay was threatened by burning tumbleweeds!
I crushed it (no access to wood chips) and used it, several inches thick, to make a nice curvy path. It worked really well! Sunflowers grew on the side, it held moisture but your shoes didn't get muddy, and mushrooms even sprouted.
🕊️
Unless it’s a small tumbleweed or your vehicle has a higher clearance then I highly suggest that you DO NOT drive over tumblweeds on the road because of the hazard of it catching underneath your vehicle
I never would have guessed tumbleweeds weren’t native plants
Controlled burns are great for handling them before they become an issue. Not a surprise that California, one of the states that got rid of their controlled burning leading to massive fires.
It can grow massively with just one heavy rain. But where it grew up usually a tumbleweed won't grow up there again for years. They really like a new place where there is nothing else like a recently cleared place for construction or farming. In the wild they are not very common.
English is not my native language and listen and speak at the same time The informal way and words help me to improve The language .thank you.😊
That last bit wasn't accurate. I was driving east on Interstate 90, in Washington State, between the Columbia River and George Washington (that's a small town, named after the founders dog, not the president) anyway the wind was blowing 30 to 40 miles per hour up out of the river gorge, ripping up many tumble weeds. They were large. One ended up jumping the barrier fence by the interstate, it was as large as my car and was just one giant tumbleweed, not a bunch of them together. I was traveling about 60mph in a 70mph zone because of the wind conditions, that tumbleweed smacked on top of my entire car, totally covering all windows for about a second and a half, then bounced off and went into the field across the road. Hit my vehicle like a giant powder puff. An interesting experience. It didn't break up after impacting with me. It did leave alot of tiny bits in my engine compartment that were blowing out of the vents when the A/C was used for months afterwards. [EDITED FOR SPELLING]
Hii🤭🤭🤭
Damm your account is old ....can u trade with my account
I don't have a tumbleweed problem but I've thought I would buy a Snow Blower with a large opening to grab and mulch them.
Not a lawn mower as it's steel blades are too close to the ground and can spark when it hits say a rock and cause a fire.
I'd also carry a backpack liquid sprayer that has a tank ...fill with water and use as a fire extinguisher if necessary.
ATTENTION!:
If you've seen the CGP Grey video you can skip this.
Living in southern California I'm very familiar with these, they're not harmful to run over sometimes they'll just stick to your car and then eventually blow off we see cars with tumbleweeds stuck on the front of them all of the time
Herbicides will not kill Russian thistles that grow happily in pools of motor oil spilled on roadsides. I first encountered that plant when I put my hands in the sand next to it. Turns out the roots are spiny, inches under the dirt. A few days ago I noticed it growing in the center of my gravel road and I believe it came in on our car tires from a local beach. A cooler trmbleweed is tumbleweed mustard which can be used to make wasabi. I planted that one in my organic garden because of the roadsides being contaminated with motor oil and often sprayed with herbicides.
No tumbleweed was left behind
To roll in wind they are designed
Prairie winds blow them in kind
To fence line where they are lined
Where they're entwined they bind
They don't always shatter. They often get stuck in a car's grill and have to be pried out.
I’ve never seen a single tumbleweed here in Florida.
CGP grey covered this years ago in one of his tangent obsession videos. invasive species are wild in the destruction they can cause
They really can cover something other than NYC! You now have my golf clap.
There's a grammatical error in the video title! The original title, by the way, was "Tumbleweeds are Invading The U.S. And It's Real Problem - Cheddar Explains". Notice the lack of an "a" between it's and real.
do you mean "And A -It's- (they are) Real Problem"?
Oh, no. You mean "And -A- It's [a] Real Problem"
Add punctuation (a comma) and fix the capitalization. The "it" refers to this phenomenon, but I'm not sure if that's the issue to which you're referring.
The a is technically an adjective and can be properly left out, though it is so uncommon now that it sounds strange to the American ear.
We should have a job thats just taking these invasive plants out and turning them into energy as biomass or o2 free composting to make methane for energy and have fertilizer as byproduct.
CGP Grey did a whole series about the tumble.
It sounds like it's a trailblazing species, like moss on bare rock type of situation. The moss uses chemicals to break down the bedrock into soils, it sounds like the tumbleweed is fast spreading, fast growing, fast dying, and will resolve it itself in two to five centuries as an issue because it's paving the way for other species. It's the two to five centuries that are the issue.
That WOULD be true if we could count on the rainfall needed for other species to become established. The problem is that we can't count on that rainfall -- with global warming, more of the western United States is becoming the equivalent of a Mediterranean zone, except without the benefit of being next to an ocean, and with the detriment that comes from being on the wrong side of high mountains from the Pacific Ocean.
“We can go to the park, after dark
Smoke that tumbleweed” - Afroman
A few rows of low fences with hooked top posts, and you have a catch area, it takes a while to work but they will breakdown and shade and provide longer lasting species a start. Best angled along a 45 to the prevailing, back and forth so each feeds the next. Think tesla valve for tumbleweeds.
the thumbnail is from victorville california
I've always been enchanted by tumbleweeds. They're vegetation ghosts traversing the world, riding on the wind, bringing new life.
I piled them after picking them while green,I piled them up.
The next year I pulled every seedling and burnt the in a different pile. Problem solved.
I live in Minnesota.
“Brambleghast wanders around arid regions. On rare occasions, mass outbreaks of these Pokémon will bury an entire town.”
-Brambleghast’s Violet Dex entry.
Grew up along the northern front range of Colorado and we dealt with tumble weeds. Some years they were bad, others not so much. Not sure it is an issue worth dumping money down a government black hole to 'research'.
A suburban sprawl forms a nice barrier to catch tumbleweed, indeed.
I had no idea that they are such a problem and that they are not native.
I once saw tumbleweeds in my local Costco parking lot in Omaha Nebraska
So you built your house where the tumbleweed roams, and now THEY'RE the invader???!!!
That
Pixelating the tumbleweeds circa 1:18 was a strange choice.
never seen a tumble weed or a prarie dog until i moved from NY to CO
So many tumbleweeds everywhere it makes me smile to see them.
I wonder if brush chipper would make it into a compost pile for decomposing to be added to soil for fertilizer, if the seeds would decompose or bloom in the compost
Random question. Are the thorns on the tumbleweed the reason ranchers wear chaps?
a tumbleweed can be 100 years old, and when it finally gets rained on it starts all over again.
What show had killer tumble weeds?! Was it the twilight zone?
No, it was *The Outer Limits*. The episode's title was "Cry of Silence".
Eastern people rake their leaves, western people rake their tumbleweeds
I've never seen tumbleweeds in Missouri
So much tumbleweed, you can make more easily critters with special effects.
Now i want big weed collecting trucks that compress them to firewood
I once almost hit a tumbleweed as big as my car on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas. They have almost buried homes around here.
Where’s the whistle, wind and whip sound?
I’m wondering whether we can get some electricity by burning them. It looks renewable too🤔
That was very interesting. I hope that the tumbleweed problem can be solved.
Does brush hogging the weed before or after it breaks off
Could they be compressed into firewood ?
I don't know but maybe a new industry.🤔
And people thought I was full of crap when I said bees aren't necessary for plants to spread and pollinate. Bees weren't always here, plants figured out how to spread their seed way before bees came along. Wind exists yo...
It could make a good fuel plant.
Just shred it, and feed it into a gasifier wood stove.
Or could be used for mulching.
.
That’s because we’re going to enter the Great Depression and dust bowl again. We lost the meaning of the rules and regulations placed afterwards.
For some reason, I find the idea "drowning in tumbleweed" as a funny thought.
I wonder if rear sites would have survived if they were just notches like your favorite carcano
Buy a pellet-making machine and start making pellets out of them. 'Free' energy and if you don't go out looking for them, they seem to roll right to your doorstep. With a bit of luck, they might roll right into your pellet-making machine...
Yah! Don’t hit them with your car or truck. They can do very significant damage to numerous systems like puncturing cooling systems, breaking brake hoses, or even fuel systems causing a fire.
THEY ARE A SERIOUS ROADWAY THREAT.
Getting one caught on the exhaust can burn your car to the ground.
Sage advice from the center of the Dust Bowl.
Greetings from the high plains of Texas!
Sammelt es auf. Schreddert es und macht Pellets für einen Ofen daraus. Das kann man sicher verkaufen. In Regionen die es brauchen können. MFG Dirk
I had to drive through a tumble weed migration last year. It messed my car up pretty good.
Can't they be used as firewood though?
They just flame really hot and high and then burn out fast. Think tinder.
make a tumble weed energy plant or build a capture area where it can compost or
create fuel from it
You really missed the opportunity to reference Fievel Goes West.
In australia we have a similar problem we call hairy panic
I like the tumbleweed expert guy LOL
Now it's a pokemon
As a city dweller we have these too. We call them tumble "weaves". 😆
Holup. 🙆🏾♂️
CGP Grey has already made video on tumble weed.
What happens if you drive into one full send? Would it wrap around the wheels and lock you up?
No. It’s a dead plant. It’s brittle so it will just break apart.
Wouldn’t wrap around the wheels and lock them up but it could potentially get caught underneath your vehicle and that can become a hazard or do minor cosmetic damage to the vehicle, the bigger/sturdier they are the more dangerous they are. Also them hitting your vehicle at high speeds driven by the wind is still pretty scary
Can't one burn them and turn them into energy somehow?
It wouldn't be economical to hire enough workers to do that, except maybe in those overrun situations. I think the early-season spraying and pulling is most effective.
@@Merlincat007 Ah, I see. Too bad.
How do tumble weeds clog sewer drains and culverts
I've seen small tumble weeds in iowa
I live in Texas....the puff balls pictured here are a joke...they never dry out. They break off and roll everywhere and are pokey-pokey plants. My porch is surrounded by these monstrous things, my 4 o'clock are no more, as are my irises. The Mesquites are doing well though.
Cue the Ennio Morricone tunes.. 😘
And here I am thinking that it was just a Southern Colorado thing...
Use them for fireplace fuel?
I used to see them in San Fernando valley.
Tumbleweeds are the cameo masters
Not all westerns feature tumble weeds.
The Fix Title.
Its not a disaster, its free fuel.
I have one in my dining room that I grew last year, funny fellas.
So why cant you grind them up; add binders; Pressure Press it; and make things out of it....
...like plywood; paper; etc...?
..Compost it into Fertilizer ...
Or it burn it into Ash Fertilizer ???
Etc...
i live in Colorad, I see tumbleweeds all the time.
Beavers. Lots of beavers. Tens of millions of beavers to rehydrate and re-establish the once-great American landscape.
If your landscape was healthy and hydrated, you wouldn't have tumbleweeds.
Yep
No beaver ever lived in the desert areas where tumbleweeds are a nuisance.
seems like a great pioneer pant.