Lopsided oat

Avena strigosa, the bristle oat, sand oat, or lopsided oat, is an annual cereal grass of the Poaceae long cultivated on poor acidic soils of western Europe and now grown widely as a cover crop and forage. Plants reach 60-150 cm tall, with stout, erect, glabrous culms in loose tufts. The leaf blades are flat, 10-30 cm long and 5-10 mm wide, soft, light green, with smooth or finely scabrid margins and rather long membranous ligules. The inflorescence is a one-sided panicle 15-30 cm long, the slender branches all tending to the same side and bearing pendulous spikelets at the tips, giving the head its characteristic lopsided silhouette. Each spikelet is 18-25 mm long and contains two to three florets; the lemmas are tipped with two slender bristles or short awns and bear a stout, twisted, geniculate dorsal awn. The grain is slender, hairy, and tightly enclosed in the lemmas.