Echinochloa crus-galli

Barnyard grass

Family: Poaceae · Type: perennial · Not Native

Barnyard grass is a naturalized annual grass found throughout California's Central Valley and foothill regions in wet, disturbed sites, fields, and roadsides at elevations below 2,000 meters. Flowering from June to October, this grass produces pale green to purplish spikelets with distinctive awned branches 5 to 25 centimeters long. Growing with spreading or erect stems 30 to 200 centimeters tall, it forms dense, adaptable clumps in agricultural and disturbed landscapes. Its long leaves measure up to 65 centimeters in length and 5 to 30 millimeters wide, with smooth leaf sheaths 3 to 7 centimeters long. The fruit is approximately brown, with upper lemmas that have a distinctive early-withering, acuminate tip marked by a line of minute hairs.

Habitat: Generally wet, disturbed sites, fields, roadsides

Bloom period: Jun-Oct

Elevation: < 2000 m

Bioregions: CA (esp CA-FP)

California counties: Humboldt, Riverside, Glenn, Orange, Merced, Fresno, Los Angeles, Kern, Butte, Mendocino, San Diego, Ventura, Nevada, San Bernardino, Imperial, Santa Clara, San Luis Obispo, Inyo, Madera, Alameda, Yuba, Monterey, Tulare, Colusa, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Lake, Napa, Sierra, Sonoma, Tehama, Tuolumne, El Dorado, Yolo, Modoc, Solano, Santa Barbara, Stanislaus, Sutter, Amador, San Joaquin, Calaveras, Sacramento, Kings, Plumas, Trinity, Marin, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Lassen, Shasta, Siskiyou, Mariposa, Del Norte, Placer

Data from The California Species Project — 14,000+ California species with verified data from CNPS, CDFW, USFWS, Jepson eFlora, Cal-IPC, and more.