I Hate Weeds

If I walk even in the vicinity of a scotch thistle - those big spiky ones with purple flowers - I feel a gravitational pull towards it. I veer off course. My right leg twitches. I’ll fold the thistle over with my left foot and deliver a half-dozen blows to its stem with the heel of my right. It’ll snap or pull from the ground or at the very least it’ll look pretty defeated.

‘That’s better’ I think to myself, ‘one less nasty weed trying to take over my field’. I walk away smug and satisfied with my effort in protecting my precious grassland. 

This (literal) knee-jerk reaction is merely evidence of my programming. I have probably killed thousands of thistles in my time. My father would pay me £0.05 for each thistle I dug up with a spade. Each swing affirming my mindset stronger and stronger:

‘thistles are weeds, weeds aren’t grass, must kill weeds’

 ‘thistles are weeds, weeds aren’t grass, must kill weeds’

 ‘thistles are weeds, weeds aren’t grass, must kill weeds’

But now I have a confession to make, my fellow thistle-kickers… I’ve stopped caring about thistles. And really any plant that I’ve always called a ‘weed’; Nettles, Ragwort, Docks, Bindweed. Now don’t worry, I haven’t stopped killing them (I was bumping along in my tractor mowing thistles just days ago), but I have stopped caring so much.

It comes down to actually understanding the reason that these undesirable plant species have popped up in the first place. Now that I can recognise the deeper ecological processes going on in the background, the nettles in the foreground become insignificant. 

Here’s the caveat: You can only stop caring about weeds if you have a plan in place to change the conditions that allow them to thrive. Farming without a plan is chaos. If I had no plan, you can bet I’d be out there in a hazmat suit and knapsack - dowsing my weeds in Round-up. That would be my plan: Firefighting. But I'm not, because I now know why they’re there.

Nature is always trying to advance a landscape up the succession scale whilst building soil in the process. Always, always, always. Even the patio outside my house is growing moss and would eventually become grassy, shrubby and even a mature woodland if you gave it time. 

I, as a grass farmer, want to pause this ecological succession at, drumroll please… grassland. So my only job is to create the conditions that grasses, legumes and forbs will thrive in. And not too many of any one species. I need to create enough disturbance to stop my field becoming a forest, but not enough to reset my field back to a condition that allows pioneering weeds to take hold. (Park that power-harrow up)

With this knowledge under my belt, an infestation of thistles is not cause to panic, it’s cause for curiosity. Why are they growing? What management decisions have created the ecological conditions for thistles to thrive? And most importantly, what can I do to change the conditions to encourage my grass to grow?

Can I change the way I graze this field?

Do I need to use mechanical or chemical disturbance to knock the weed back?

How much more rest does this field need?

It would be naive of me to not recognise the invasive nature of some species, that may require different management to traditional methods, but truly the fact remains that the first question to ask is always ‘why’.

I hope that adopting this mindset will be as empowering for you as it has been for me. Hating weeds becomes a lot more fun when you stop feeling powerless.