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Avena fatua
Also called Spring Wild Oat, Wild Oats, Common Wild Oats, Drak, Wild Oat, Flaxgrass, Wheat Oats
Avena fatua, the common wild oat, is an annual grass in the grass family (Poaceae) that behaves as a weed in most temperate regions. It is grown only as a weed or forage, and the key to working with it is that its seeds shatter at maturity and reseed each year.
Avena fatua is a species of grass in the oat genus. It is known as the common wild oat. Like fellow wild oat species A. sterilis, it bears 42 chromosomes, and its seeds shatter at maturity for yearly seeding. This oat is native to Eurasia (particularly the eastern Mediterranean) but it has been introduced to most of the other temperate regions of the world. It is naturalized in some areas and considered a noxious weed in others.
A. fatua is a typical oat in appearance, a green grass with hollow, erect stems 1 to 4 feet (0.30 to 1.22 m) tall bearing nodding structures – panicles – of spikelets. The long dark green leaves are up to 1 centimetre (0.39 in) wide and rough due to small hairs. The seedlings are also hairy. The seed kernel is thinner, longer, darker and hairy when compared with the seed of the common cultivated oat (A. sativa).
Abyssinian oat · Short Oat · Algerian Oat · Naked oat · Oat · Lopsided oat · Oat
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Avena fatua by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
