Elkhart ? The way the wind blows out here, you’re never sure which county they come from, Sandy Turner said.

“But in 28 years I’ve never seen them this bad,” said Turner, Elkhart’s water clerk.

She is talking about tumbleweeds.

A three-year drought put the western half of Kansas behind in annual rainfall, with the towns of Elkhart and Rolla among the driest of the dry.

Last fall, it finally rained, but it was too late to save the wheat crop or to green up pastures. That moisture made this a banner year for Russian thistle, or as most people call them, tumbleweeds.

“Tumbleweeds are worse than normal this year because of the drought,” said Nancy Brewer, rangeland specialist at the Cimarron National Grassland in Morton County.

And high winds have added to their nuisance factor.

Tumbleweeds will wedge around a barbed wire fence until it looks like bushy, brown shrubbery. The rolling bushes’ massed weight when pushed by high winds will blow down a fence. Leave them until the first snow, add some wind and the fence is gone in a minute.

Hit one of the big ones blowing across the road and it’ll “take the paint off your car,” Turner said.

Tumbleweeds, like these that nearly cover a barbed-wire fence near Elkhart in Morton County, are worse this year than most residents can remember. If

Runaway propagation

Behind her house just west of Elkhart off Kansas Highway 27, she’s had them stacked more than 10 feet high and 2 feet deep in her big front yard.

“The only way you can get the darned things out is with a pitch fork, one weed at a time,” Turner said. “Try burning them in this wind and we’d be in big trouble.”

The city dug a pit where residents could drop off tumbleweeds they found tangled in their rose bushes or caught in their fences. One weed can fill a trash bag, so packaging them for citywide pickup is impossible.

The invasive weed arrived in America in 1877 mixed with flax seed shipped from Russia to South Dakota. After a rainfall followed by warm weather they germinate and in the spring break from their stems and start tumbling, scattering as many as 250,000 seeds per plant. By early 1900 they had tumbled to the West Coast, sowing their seeds all along the way.

Paul Rickabaugh, county extension agent in Comanche County, said one reason for the tumbleweed boom was that more farmers are going to “no-till” soil preparation that requires less cultivation.

“They tend not to do a very good job of controlling the weeds,” he said.

Tumbleweeds can be as small as soccer balls or approach the size of a Volkswagen.

Out-of-state fans

Piles of tumbleweeds that blew into a tree-sheltered corner of a pasture next to the home of Sandy Turner near Elkhart dwarf her 6-foot-2-inch neighbor, Brandon Colborn, and his son. Colborn recently helped Turner clear her cattle feed bunk and watering tank of the weeds.

Linda Katz may be one of the few people in western Kansas who actually likes tumbleweeds. She’s been selling them on her Web site, www.prairietumbleweedfarm.com, from her home in Garden City for nine years.

“I got my first order from a woman in New Jersey,” she said with a laugh. “She bought them to decorate the food table at her daughter’s wedding … it was a Western motif.”

Katz walked out her door, found two tumbleweeds, boxed them up and sent them to the anxious mother. Her second order arrived the next day. Today she ships the dry, hollow-stemmed weeds around the world. Orders come from Japan, Australia and England.

“At first the UPS guy accused me of shipping air,” Katz recalled.

She created the Web site in 1994 as a joke. She was looking for a “different” way to display photos of her nieces and nephews, then in grade school, online so their relatives could see them.

“I didn’t want to just put head shots on there so I got them some hard hats, put them on some heavy equipment filled with tumbleweeds and wrote some headlines about our tumbleweed farm where we grew organic weeds,” she said.

The e-mails started coming.

After the nearly weightless tumbleweeds are caught on fences they form an air-tight covering that, when hit by high winds, can knock over a fence. This already leaning stretch of barbed wire is east of Elkhart.

Movie and theater producers bought them for their sets. One Christmas, The Pottery Barn, a chain of upscale furniture and accessory shops, ordered 800 for window decorations. Other people buy them to use as Christmas trees.

“I warn them not to use hot lights, just the tiny ones,” Katz said.

Sized in large (20 inches tall) , medium and small (12-14 inches), tumbleweeds sell for $25, $20 and $15 dollars each plus a $7 or $8 shipping fee in the United States.

Katz once sent 30 tumbleweeds to Vienna, Austria, for a movie-maker who asked that they be sent as soon as possible by air. Shipping cost him $100 a weed.

“I figure if a person can sell tumbleweeds, you can sell just about anything,” Katz said. “People get on eBay and sell antiques without a shop so I guess I can sell tumbleweeds from the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm without the farm.”