From bird seed

[ideasguy]

The birds were a bit picky over the seed I fed them with over winter on a flower bed outside my office window (where I could enjoy watching the range of birds that were attracted).
As a result, I have a fine crop of Barley, Corn and wheat (please confirm if you can recognise)
Out of curiosity, I let some of them grow and as you see, its almost harvest time.

However, one strange plant has popped up from what I presume was the bird seed.
The green plant, about 3 ft tall and 2ft spread (below) has palmate leaves with 8 lobes and very serrated edges - coarse to feel and
not aromatic.
No flowers appeared, and no seed heads on the plant, that I can see.

Questions:
1) What is it?
2) Is it legal  (I just happened to catch a glimpse of a program last night and uniformed gentlemen forced an entry into a house and found something similar growing inside - the resident was apprehended).



and heres a closer view of the foliage:

[NightHawk]

Our bird feeders are at the bottom of our back garden next to the greenhouse.

At one time we used to buy the no-grow seed but it is a lot more expensive than the wild bird seed.  So now we buy the wild bird seed from a local pet store.

We have noticed that there is some growth from the wild seed in the ground below the feeders (which looks a bit like wild grass), but we tend to weed them out before they get too big.  Ours don't look anything like your plant growth though George.

Generally, the Wood Pigeons and Collared Doves in particular will eat the fallen seeds, so it's not that much of a problem.

Let's see if anyone else can identify your little 'plants', and hope that you don't get carted off in the back of a police van in the meantime.

Laurie.

[ideasguy]

 

I had a member of the Rose Society of N. Ireland with me today, inputting the names of his Roses (into IG pro) and matching them to photos I took of his garden way back in 2005 - a photographic tour of member gardens.
He also has a small farm, and told me it was wheat, not barley, but didn't recognise the little round headed plants.
He'd never seen anything like my mystery plant.

I experimented with the types of seed over winter Laurie. The most popular was the tiny black niger seeds.
Heres an interesting article:
http://www.ebirdseed.com/nyjer_niger_thistle_birdseed.html

The botanical name of the Niger plant is Guizotia abyssinica
A quick surf shows me that it is not my mystery plant.

[Lyn and Malcolm]

Hemp

Malcolm

[ideasguy]

 
The industrial variety, I sincerely hope!

[roiphil]

c*****s  years ago the mother in law had cockatiels and the old food they did not eat she used to chuck out in flower bed in the front garden had a fine crop of c******s one year