Dodder, the Vampire Plant

 Earlier in the summer, I noticed an odd orange vine growing amongst my carrots.  I pulled it out and didn't think much about it.  Things
have been pretty dry, but in the past week, we have had a good bit of rain.  Two days ago, I took a good look at the carrots, and there was a lot of this thin orange vine again.

It was also in the unharvested potato patch.  I asked my mother, a master gardener, about thin orange vines, and she didn't know what it was.  We googled it, and discovered that this stuff is a parasitic plant called Dodder.  it is pretty evil stuff.  It's seeds are too tiny to see, and while it germinates in the soil, it "smells" suitable nearby host plants and heads for them.  Tomatoes and potatoes are favorites.  Once in finds a host, it wraps around the stem, and inserts itself into the vascular system of the host plant, sucking out moisture and nutrients.

Wikipedia has a good post about it here.  Nasty stuff.  Yesterday I ripped all the dodder I could find out of the garden.  Some of the vines had formed flowers.  I can only hope that none of the vines fully matured and spit out seeds.  This is not a plant I want to deal with in the future.

The real unknown is how dodder seed wound up in my garden in the first place.  Bird poop?  Maybe the carrot seed I used was contaminated with dodder seed?  I'll never know.