The Meadow Makers' Network Forum

PS for a discussion on chemical free blackthorn control - have a look here: viewtopic.php?f=35&t=620
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In an ideal world, I'd never use spray. I can just about manage in the garden. Field scale - how do you do it?

I've noticed the disapproval of spraying on here.

Do you just live with certain things, is it a matter of personal preferences and time?

I've walked across an organic farm over run with docks. The owner trusts to the dock beetle. I've seen on my own land the shocking extent to which docks can shade out surrounding vegetation. I don't want that.

With the best will in the world - there are not enough hours to dig out thugs, and from mid May to mid Sept, the clay bakes impenetrably, roots break off, the back makes urgent protest and gives ominous warnings.

What do you do with dug out dock roots? It goes against the grain to put that huge volume of plant matter and some earth into the black bin or to burn them. I've read that docks contain tannins, to protect against rotting. There's far too great a volume to stick the roots into a water tub and test this out. Ditto deadheaded thistle heads - leave them for a day and they seem to accelerate into seed. Is it a choice between bagging up into the black bin or fire?

I've tried digging out timber-hard high purple moor grass tumps and huge clumps of docks with a mini digger. This leaves huge craters needing fresh soil.. No good.

We try to do the right thing- brash piles for wildlife - which produce yet more nettles and brambles which then spread.

I've noticed wet thugs - purple moor grass, marsh ragwort, pendulous sedge, spanish bluebell hybrids, hemlock water dropwort, to name just a few, spreading from adjoining woodland with open newly planted conifer plantations.

4 years of non management led to the drier areas being over run by large cocksfoot tussocks with a massive seed burden. Cocksfoot is now in fields where it never was before. Sure, I can dig out a few, cut, graze, - it doesn't seem enough to keep pace with the spread.

A professional suggested I don't fight nature and let part of the land revert to a sort of culm. The land over the last 30 years never used to be like this. A change of management from all year round horse grazing, wetter weather, more springs, seeds from next door, is changing it.

But- I don't want to have the wetter parts of the land over run with purple moor grass, the drier parts over run with docks, thistles, nettles, etc etc. I also want to look back when I'm finally decrepit on a life well lived, not a pathetic little life spent toiling for hours every day on a tiny patch of land -- which the next person may well drain, spray off, reseed and return to horse pasture! I don't want the thugs to spread with every year as old age limits me. I don't want the land looking like the nearby boggy culm nature reserves with a mass of all-swamping moor grass litter, and devalued for when I eventually sell.

So - please tell me - how do you manage without spraying. I don't believe it can be done. Please - convince me.



(Written as an office worker, unaccustomed to a great deal of manual labour, but used to the quick fix of spraying, and whilst feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work, (in retrospect - compounded by a heavy dose of the lockdown blues; but I think the points are still relevant for people without their own grazing animals. I would love to know what other people without farm machinery or grazing animals do.))

(Well - There's a fair amount of burbling from me on further posts below, but I am still waiting/hoping for some input from experienced organic landowners please???)

Hi Amy
First of all I'm a relative beginner at all this and don't have the answers...like you, I really really urge the more experienced members on this forum to come on and share their experiences, in detail, of how they manage. I want to know too and have had all the same thoughts as you about how much time I want to spend pulling out brambles.

At the moment I'm living in faith that as I scythe and move away ( to field edges) vegetation,year on year I will decrease the soil fertility and eventually end up with about the kind of meadow I want.
I refuse to use herbicides...what's the point of us doing this if were just ending up covering the place with poisonous chemicals? I'll give up and sell the land to a farmer if it comes to that.

Only one thing I would ask Amy? Do you have a scythe? A good sized patch of dock/nettles/etc scythed down in its prime and vegetation raked away would surely wear them down after a couple of years? We did this with bracken and it worked fairly well.
It would be so quick to do, as dock at least has soft stems.

Yay - there's someone out there.. Thank You, Jane! I bet there are many more like us out there - dead keen, but (I am) beginning to struggle. We're not farmers, we don't have the machinery, the grazing animals, or the knowledge, and our land is larger than a garden, but not big enough to farm. We'd like detailed stories of their own experiences from the experienced and from the professionals please.

For the haycut, I have just bought some appropriate machinery and I have a battery strimmer. For me it was the very tiring and time consuming raking up that convinced me to invest, so a scythe wouldn't help me particularly, though thank you, Jane, for the suggestion, and I gather that they are an MM speciality. That side should be sorted for this summer - if, if machinery can replace grazing animals and a haycut.

For me at the stage I am at now, it's the physical digging out that is the issue. I can't keep up with the particular perennials that I want to control.. For me, it boils down a choice between the extent of time and manual labour I can tolerate, plus a bit of cautious targeted spot spraying, - vis a vis reverting to letting the grass all year round and not doing anything to encourage wild flowers, and even that is only if I can find any stock owners interested (and no one wants to put cattle on due to the TB testing requirements and sheep would single out the devils bit scabious to eat) and then probably still some spot spraying..

I'm thinking - if I can get all the roots out, then that particular perennial weed won't trouble me in future, especially if I can sow phacelia or something temporary to cover up the resulting disturbed earth until the grass covers it over again - or put in a division of a wild flower - rather than having to strim it repeatedly through each year, year after year, to weaken it. So I dig out what I can, and deadhead the rest, or at least those I can reach.. And that is many many hours of work. ..Not something I want to be doing in 10 or even 5 years time.

Am I wrong? Should I just be spot cutting the leaves off the docks, and other problem species, through out each year, - or - cutting sections of the field in rotation- and isn't that latter action just as much work with the added risk that I miss the seed heads in the non cut sections and meanwhile the clumps continue to clump up further?

And I've read from multiple Natural England docs that cutting and or grazing doesn't hinder moor grass at all, the only thing to control moor grass is preventing seeding and extermination by herbicide.

(To clarify, my land is not a "special meadow" but it does have a lot more flowers and wildlife than the nearby culm moors managed by DWT, and I fear their loss if the moor grass and other thugs mentioned in my first post, take over.)

And- do we not all see multiple sources of online advice, (MM excepted), even on wildlife trust websites, that to create a meadow, one should spray off the rye grass and all the "weeds" first to create a barren space before seeding with the wanted "weeds". So is it a choice between (a) spray everything thoroughly at the start - or (b) spot spray a little but in every future year - or - (c) go without spraying - but how??

The reason behind this advice to start with a clean sprayed slate is really coming home to me - if you start with natural regeneration, you also start with all the problem species and have to tackle them in every future year. if you start with a clean sprayed slate, then it must be so much easier.

Of course, of course, spot spraying is not ideal. Do we all have electric cars, eat absolutely everything organic, wear non plastic clothes, live in super eco houses, don't use up electricity for our emails.... use non-diesel/non petrol tractors ( I don't think there are such things or is that a human wielding a scythe ?)

I think not. We all do our best according to our personal circumstances.

I'd like to do better.

It would be nice to have some advice from experienced people on here.

Please - If you don't use herbicide - how do you manage?


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Plantlife to the rescue: - Right, I am going to stop agonising about this. I have gone over to the dark side in last resort desperation, and spot sprayed some of my moor grass, (still leaving 2 permanent pockets of it,) cringing at the sight of the yellowing tumps, whilst underneath feeling quite hugely relieved and joyful as the space around them clears and the land is reclaimed. For anyone who has had similar feelings: Even Plantlife, even Plantlife in its article: Restoring species-rich grassland by natural regeneration and
colonisation- says:Control problem weeds such as docks, thistles and nettles, either by handpulling, or spot-spraying (seek advice on suitable products and do not use alongside waterways). It may take more than one year to control these plants and should to be done with enough time for to be effective. Using herbicides after restoration will also kill
wildflowers and grasses. The recipient site is not suitable if it has a high weedproblem and an alternative site should
be chosen.
The same paragraph is repeated for http://www.magnificentmeadows.org.uk/as ... ixture.pdf and http://www.magnificentmeadows.org.uk/as ... en_hay.pdf

So yep, I may have caught the odd leaf of meadowsweet or tormentil as I carefully sprayed the moor grass using a shrub shelter to contain the droplets, but the collateral damage is minute and there are many many more meadow sweet and tormentils elsewhere in the field. Relief.

Just an update as some people kindly replied on the email exchange.

The short answer to almost everything, by 2 separate experts, was 'Graze Lightly in the Summer'. This was for wet land.

We can't find animals to borrow for a small acreage. I've thought about buying a couple of dexters purely as field mowers, but we're going to try cutting with a flail mower collector for this year. This is an experiment.

(just found 2 horses to borrow for late spring and summer. Horses don't usually get laminitis so should be able to cope with the summer grass, which might harm ponies. This might be just over the recommended livestock unit ratio per hectare, but will do for this year. I anticipate they'll eat the sweeter grass first and we'll still have to cut the cocksfoot patches, but I'm hoping the horses will save me a lot of hours on the tractor, and I'm hoping that if the horses go by the end of August, I might still get a few devil's bit scabious and knapweed laggardly flowers... Meanwhile the existing perennial flowers will still have their roots in the soil so will reappear in future years even if grazed off this year.)

Don't Do as I did -
Some thoughts on lessons hard learned (amateur mistakes) ... to save work if one chooses not to spray

1. Brash piles, 2. Moor grass 3. Docks

1. Brash piles
Choose your site with care. Brash begets brambles and nettles as the decaying plant material enriches the soil. Are you happy for nettles and brambles to colonise this area for the forseeable future?
Butterflies don't usually lay eggs on nettles in the shade. Animals like to pull brash piles apart and then trample them into the ensuing mud.
Only have as many brash piles as you are happy to weed/or happy to have transformed into a nettle and bramble patch for the future.

(We merrily disposed of our garden waste all around the perimeters of the fields - So Easy, we thought, This is Saving Work and Avoiding Bonfires, we thought - now 3 years plus later, we have a multitude of problematic areas. Nettles in the shade so not much use to anything. Brambles spreading. And how do you extricate brambles from the depths of a heap? I have met one impressive MM member who has an immaculate brash pile because he weeds it. I have about 12 piles.... One professional suggested hessian beneath the pile. Another thought that cutting would control the spread because the surrounding soil is generally very poor. Is it a choice between the work of dismantling a heap in year 3 and moving it before the weeds take hold, or perhaps putting unsightly polluting black plastic over it to exclude light - and the effect on the insects and rodents beneath? Future piles will very definitely be sited more carefully and be limited in number.)

2. Moor grass
2 professionals have each advised me to control the moor grass by grazing and cutting rather than spraying. (I realise that culm is special etc, etc, etc, but, there is a lot more to "culm" than just moor grass. I have extensive and spreading masses of culm flowers so I don't want moor grass out-competing them.)

Super important in my view: If you already have short moor grass, then don't do what I did and take your eye off it, and leave it unmanaged for even just 3 - 4 years. If moor grass has been allowed to thicken and to form tall solid tussocks, then in my personal observation, it is too late to control it by mere grazing. Some of my moor grass tussocks are so tall and thick and as hard as timber, that nothing short of agricultural strength machinery slicing them off, or killing by spray, is going to reduce them; they are all-dominating and very difficult to walk through. I understand that this would not matter and is part of the diversity of a sward, where the moor grass is found on small outlying patches on a farm, or the top of the moors, where no one but the cattle walk - but where there is only a small acreage and it is also precious amenity land, then space can really really matter. So, don't relax, thinking 'how beautiful are those tall flower and seedheads', that way leads to much more work and the loss of other more desirable plants, unless you are happy to have a spreading mass of tall thick tussocks.

3. Docks
Do you really hand dig docks at farm scale?
I spent the year of lockdown hand digging docks. One learns where the dock patches and creeping thistles repeat each year. Where the sward is thick, the docks are almost defeated. Where livestock has poached a shaded area under trees, the docks return each year on the bare ground and it is a question of finding time to attack them as seedlings in spring or leaving them and digging up the bigger plants during the wet season, and disturbing the earth again. Lesson learned - don't disturb the earth, keep it covered, and remove every one and every part of those dock seed heads in good time before they begin to shatter. (update: I would do a strike through here if I could - change that to "immediately I see a flowering head". From the guide mentioned below: "16 % of the seeds are viable only 6 days after the first flowering. 18 days after the first flowering 90 % of the green seeds are viable.")

Generally - perhaps the hardest lessons are - don't be in a rush, try to accept that the dominant plants are not necessarily thugs but just plants very well suited to the site, and, don't be a perfectionist.

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** Update** Found a comprehensive guide for organic dock control written for farmers but equally helpful to meadow makers. https://www.organicresearchcentre.com/w ... ontrol.pdf Strongly recommended.

Thanks Amy for useful experience/feedback....interesting thoughts on brash/collected cuttings piles. My experience supports your idea that brambles ( haven't yet seen nettles colonising) will colonise brash piles. However..I do find it relatively easy to then scythe them back toward the brash piles.
We have trees between fields so the brash piles are under the trees ...slightly shaded which stunts the growth of brambles a bit.
Be careful where you site cuttings piles is very good advice.
In my experience best place is along the edge of woodland if you have it, (or inside the wooded area if you have the energy). A coppice is ideal as the nutrition then provides firewood.

Positive sides of these brash piles is lovely habitat for mice, voles and amphibians ( nice and warm as it rots down and protected from trampling)

Thanks, Jane, I agree with you re brash piles under shade limiting the brambles and a wood or a coppice is probably the very best place.
Your comment of only brambles growing on your brash has made me belatedly realise that some of the brash piles with the rampant sky high nettles growing on them lie immediately below a much much higher track walked along by a dairy herd and below their fertilised fields. (It's not obvious on the ground - embankments and so on, track set back well out of view.) My worst dock patch is along the same stretch too, and the deer jump down there and poach the land slightly. I thought I knew my soil was very poor, so I blamed the brash alone, I hadn't thought of nutrients regularly coming in from elsewhere. So thank you, an extra lesson learned - don't further enrich and disturb soil already permeated by a little slurry and fertiliser run off.

Nothing to be done about the slurry run off, there can't be much of it, it's not even visible, but we're in the direct line of natural drainage, and we've already dug one diverting ditch (towards a wood and hedge not into a watercourse); I will move the brash piles this summer and will have to look at what I already have elsewhere to find a replacement more desirable-to-me-than-docks-and-nettles wild plant that will rejoice in the wet slightly slurried soil, and for this particular north facing position, can cope with some shade and won't further shade my own land.

(Update - brooklime is easy to fork out of a wildlife pond right now, (mid Jan,) and has lots of new roots, so I'm going to try that, just treading the runners into the wet soil in a tricky area which gets the run off, and I'll try watermint later - it might work - ordinary culinary mint likes rich soil, and I've had watermint ramping in heavy clay which dries out in summer. I'm hoping they will cover the bare earth and thus outcompete new dock and nettle seedlings and I'll plant some near the brash piles, ready to spread after the brash is moved. (I'll cover the mature nettles with black plastic (reused for the umpteenth time over years) after the brash has gone. I'll cover some of the sunnier bare earth with mats of yarrow rhizomes and some running stems of brooklime, now, so they can root before the ground dries out, (I've seen both growing in manured soil elsewhere. We're wondering whether to invest in a chipper to avoid the labour problem with future innumerable brash piles. Not very green, but practical to save work?)

(Further update - October. The brooklime and watermint survived until the drought in July when they disappeared, but by then grasses had more or less covered the poached area. I don't know if my experiments reduced the number of germinating dock seeds; I'll tell myself they did! I think the watermint will reappear next year, it's pretty tough. The red deer jump down from a slurried embankment absolutely covered in someone else's uncontrolled docks, to poach this spot in my field, so a few new dock plants are now appearing in the disturbed earth. I'll have a go at digging them out when the ground is wet this winter, and I'll try to cover up the disturbed earth with spare plants - knapweed rosettes and perhaps even cocksfoot/moor grass tussocks and some bark chippings. Dock seeds need bare earth and light to germinate, so they can't compete well with shade and dense vegetation. I've been racking my brains to think of a native low growing shrub which would provide ongoing shade and competition. It would not suit me to plant trees or tall shrubs in that particular area. I can't think of a shrub which wouldn't entail more maintenance, so I'm going to try to reroute the deer (change the fence in that spot (((PS I've since put large branches against the deer run - free, instead of expensive high fencing, the deer are avoiding those spots and jumping in in other places where it doesn't matter - no docks))), and let the poached wet slurried area become tussocky. I've not sprayed this area yet and will see if this experiment will work instead!
I''ve not got around to moving or covering the brash piles, but it seems that my advisor was right, the nettles have not yet spread onto the surrounding poorer land. I'm going to hire a chipper to deal with the next round of tree, branch and shrub garden prunings, to avoid creating more brash piles.)

Allelopathic plants - could they be used as an organic method to help control (other) problem species?

I was initially very pleased when elder self seeded into the outer edge of a garden hedge, but am now wondering if the elder is the reason for my nearby cultivated garden plants dying off or failing to thrive. A farmer friend tells me that country lore advises that an elder will kill off an area of field boundary hedge. So can this effect be put to good use on problem scrub or problem meadow plants?

Eg if one deliberately planted elder trees on the outer edges of an area of scrub - might that inhibit the spread of the other scrub plants, such as the rampantly suckering blackthorn, to areas where one doesn't want them? Or minimise or slow the thickening up of those other scrub plants, such as dogwood? And Thus Save a Lot of Work?
(I'm thinking that elder trees don't form layered dense thickets and are relatively small and shortlived trees, so shouldn't create a problem in themselves, in this circumstance.)

"Allelopathy can be regarded as a component of biological control in which plants are used to reduce the vigour and development of other plants. Allelopathy refers to the direct or indirect chemical effects of one plant on the germination, growth, or development of neighbouring plants. This can be through the release of allelochemicals while the plant is growing or from plant residues as it rots down. These chemicals can be released from around the germinating seed, in exudates from plant roots, from leachates in the aerial part of the plant and in volatile emissions from the growing plant. Both crops and weeds are capable of producing these compounds and in this case the desired effect is the impaired germination, reduced growth and poor development of weeds."
https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/direct ... llelopathy

Digging a little online, I find a blog which says that bracken will inhibit the spread of scrub, but of course bracken is probably far too much of an invasive problem in itself to be of practical help in limiting other plants.

The native garlic mustard and purging buckthorn are said to be allelopathic here https://wildflowerfinder.org.uk/Flowers ... Plants.htm So could they be planted in specific places to discourage other rampant plants?
It would certainly be very easy to shake the seedheads of garlic mustard onto disturbed ground around a patch of, say, nettles, or hogweed, and see if the nettles are inhibited. I think it's worth 5 minutes of my time. And if there is no effect, so what, there'll be more food plants for the orange tip caterpillars.

I found an abstract which, I think, says that some soil microbes will break down allelopathic chemicals eventually. https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley ... 2664.12878 (I've only skim read this as it is far too scientific for me, and perhaps some kind person will further translate it into language comprehensible to lay persons.) So I conclude simplistically, fwiw, (but am happy to be corrected) that deliberately planting an allelopathic plant somewhere, doesn't necessarily mean that one is planting a problem which will inhibit the growth of other plants for ever.

Then I found this abstract "Allelopathy Among Some British Grassland Species" https://www.jstor.org/stable/2258598 which just might be worth an experiment or two.
To pick out some points:

1. perennial rye grass, common cat's ear, ribwort plantain and white clover -"(Lolium perenne, Hypochoeris radicata, Plantago lanceolata and Trifolium repens) grew more slowly when receiving leachate from their own species"

2. sweet vernal grass, crested dogstail grass, yorkshire fog grass .... "(..Anthoxanthum odoratum, Cynosurus cristatus and Holcus lanatus) showed the opposite response, growing faster with leachate from their own species"

Confirming what we are all regularly told - it's important to pick up cut grass.

3. and the general interesting point: "These results could explain why some of these species can be strongly dominant in grassland, whereas others are found interspersed with other species."

4. But, the para starts off by saying - "When averaged over all receivers, leachates from all eight donor species were significantly inhibitory compared with the Nil control" so does that mean the negative inhibitory effect on some species strongly outweighed the positive effect on others, thus tilting the average? I can't access the original studies to get a clearer picture.

Anyway - what I'm wondering, (as an amateur so shoot me down in a kind way only please) is - If we wanted to Discourage perennial ryegrass - would it be worth depositing the mowings from a ryegrass lawn on to ryegrass in a field, as the mowings would rot down and become leachate, and hence weaken the field ryegrass? (or would this over-enrich the soil? but perhaps for a time limited number of lawn mowings, this would weaken or kill the field ryegrass, and the soil enrichment would only be temporary and not matter? I have been told that a lawn mowing mulch acidifies the soil - so is that a bad thing or again just temporary and would not matter overmuch?)

And I'm wondering, that if we wanted to Encourage sweet vernal grass to grow in one area more strongly - would that be achieved by depositing mowings of sweet vernal grass from another area of field, so the mowings rot down?

And, applying this generally, if there are a couple of species growing strongly in a field, and we wanted more of those same species, might it be worth an experiment to deposit mowings of those species onto a smaller clump to rot down and to see if this discourages or encourages strong growth?

(Or, forgetting these simplistic meanderings, just use common sense and say = perhaps some species are just more dominant because they naturally spread strongly vegetatively, like yarrow and meadow sweet. And, one could just spread the seeds or divide and replant the rhizomes of the desired species where one wants it!)

There are several youtube videos on this subject and the research is of course the reverse of what we meadow makers want - how to suppress weeds in favour of crops - but the impetus towards finding alternatives to herbicides has got to be good and there may be things coming out which we can find useful.

As yet, there is no clear answer so far for weed control using allelopathic plants.
https://www.agricology.co.uk/sites/defa ... opathy.pdf

But surely worth a fun experiment or two?