The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Land Management => Topic started by: DenisCooper on September 09, 2018, 12:35:51 pm
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Hey
I’m out in the fields today and seeing lots of creeping thistle coming through.
Will pulling each individual plant out with the main root stop them coming back or will the ‘creeping’ root still cause more shoots to come back?
Rest of the fields are looking great!
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Pulling or digging it out will have no effect. The creeping bit can go down a long way and is a series of interwoven, easily broken roots. You'll never get them all out.
With spear thistle, digging out by hand can take several years of diligence, but does work in the end.
Constant cutting, preferably with a lawn mower with a collecting box, so the spikey leaves don't stick in fleece, mouths etc, seems to be the only successful way to kill creeping thistle. Eventually the roots run out of nutrients, as they have no leaves to feed them. It takes several years and there are always more waiting in the wings. Mowing spear thistle definitely doesn't work.
The other possibility is I suppose using chemical weedkillers, but if you are like us and don't want chemicals on your land, then cutting is your means.
As a compensation for having creeping thistle, honey bees love them, making any patch of the sweet smelling light blue flowers abuzz with activity.
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I'd spot spray them with a selective weedkiller if you can get your hands on some. I tried mowing for years with little effect and my fields had really dense patches of thistle where nothing could get inbetween to graze properly. Now I spot spray once a year now just to keep on top of the odd one that appears.