What is "avena fatua"

Oat \Oat\ ([=o]t), n.; pl. Oats ([=o]ts). [OE. ote, ate, AS.

1. (Bot.) A well-known cereal grass ( Avena sativa), and its edible grain, used as food and fodder; -- commonly used in the plural and in a collective sense.

2. A musical pipe made of oat straw. [Obs.] --Milton. Animated oats or Animal oats (Bot.), A grass ( Avena sterilis) much like oats, but with a long spirally twisted awn which coils and uncoils with changes of moisture, and thus gives the grains an apparently automatic motion. Oat fowl (Zo["o]l.), the snow bunting; -- so called from its feeding on oats. [Prov. Eng.] Oat grass (Bot.), the name of several grasses more or less resembling oats, as Danthonia spicata, Danthonia sericea, and Arrhenatherum avenaceum, all common in parts of the United States. To feel one's oats,

   1. to be conceited or self-important. [Slang]

   2. to feel lively and energetic.

      To sow one's wild oats, to indulge in youthful dissipation.
      --Thackeray.

      Wild oats (Bot.), a grass ( Avena fatua) much resembling oats, and by some persons supposed to be the original of cultivated oats.

Avena fatua is a species of grass in the oat genus. It is known as the common wild oat. This oat is native to Eurasia 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.

Avena fatua is a typical oat in appearance, a green grass with hollow, erect stems 1 to 4 feet (30-120 cm) tall bearing nodding panicles of spikelets. The long dark green leaves are up to a centimeter wide and rough due to small hairs. The seedlings are also hairy. This and other wild oats can become troublesome in prairie agriculture when it invades and lowers the quality of a field crop, or competes for resources with the crop plants. It takes very few wild oat plants to cause a significant reduction in the yield of a wheat or cultivated oat field, even though the seeds are a type of oat.