Organic weed control

Two years ago, we participated in a county program in which workers came in and cleared out severely overgrown underbrush for purposes of fire mitigation.

Part of our contractual obligation to participate in this program is to maintain the condition of the property after the brush was removed (in other words, not to let it get overgrown again). In talking over how best to do this with the rep, we mentioned we were getting cows at some future point.

She was delighted. "Cows are one of the very best ways to control weeds!"

Of course she's right. The condition of the sacrifice pasture after the cows finished with it is proof enough.

Part of our intense rotation for the cows, therefore, is weed control. At this time of year, grass is growing fast and growing thick. We're managing the cows so they can eat things down without leaving them so long in any one place that they damage the baseline plant growth. Later in the summer, when the grass stops growing and things dry out, we'll have to be careful that the cows don't overgraze anything.

One of the places the cows had never been is the driveway area between the house and barn. This is staging area where we keep a lot of unkempt and loose stuff: Tractor implements, large items such as the log splitter and a small trailer, and miscellaneous things such as the burn barrel and scrap wood from the shop. It's where we keep rolls of fencing, unsplit log rounds, stacked and tarped lumber, unused cinder blocks, and the tarped hay bales. It's a messy and disorganized area we're not eager for visitors to see, ha ha.

But, because it's spring, many places are getting overgrown with grass between all these items. We really wanted the cows to graze it down, purely for purposes of weed control.

So we worked to cow-proof this section. We fenced off awkward angles against the hillside or in places we didn't want them to go (such as squeezing behind a shed). We picked up anything sharp that might hurt them. And finally, yesterday morning, we opened a connecting gate and called them in.

This is an especially overgrown section of hillside, and we welcomed the cows eating it down.

Of course, being cows, they did a lot of poking around. For obvious reasons, we're keeping the barn and shop doors closed while the animals are in the driveway.

Also, being cows, they're leaving a lot of cow patties. But that's okay. Cow patties aren't a fire hazard, just a walking hazard.

This open gate leads to a side chute against the barn, which in turn leads to the water tank at the back of the barn. The cows are familiar with the chute and therefore knew were to find water.

There's not enough grass in this section to keep the cows interested for more than two or three days, at which point we'll release them into the newly subdivided large pasture. Later in the summer, we'll probably put them in the driveway again, just to make sure it stays eaten down.

Organic weed control. Gotta love it.

Picking flowers

When Don and I returned from our second honeymoon, I noticed some stately flowers in bloom all over the place.

These are the flowers of the much-hated hound's tongue (Cynoglossum officinale), a biennial invasive weed that was Eurasian in origin.

I had never heard of this plant before we moved to our current location, and at first was inclined to see the plant as stately and beautiful.

That was before it went to seed ... and the seeds are loathsome burrs that cling to everything. I hate hound's tongue with a passion. (Bonus complaint: It's also toxic to livestock.)

So I went on a one-woman vendetta to eliminate this plant from our property. Unfortunately, like all good invasive weeds, it is simply everywhere.

Here's a sample of last year's seeds. The slightest jostle or brush, and they're all over you.

So when we returned from our trip and I saw the hound's tongue was in bloom, in irritation I snapped off the flowers of a plant in the yard.

And then I had an idea. It was impossible to get rid of all the plants, of course; but what if I just got rid of the flowers? No flowers, no seeds.

So I fetched a 30-gallon tub and a pair of gloves, waded out into the pastures, and started picking flowers.

Hound's tongue tends to cluster. When I find one plant, I usually find a lot.

The flowers can form well down the stems, so I tried to go as low as possible.

Sometimes when yanking a flower, I yanked out the whole plant. Well shucky-darn.

Quite a taproom, no? I've dug out some plants that had taproots six inches across. It looked like some freaky weird root crop.

I filled up one of the tubs with flowers, and went back to get another tub. Altogether in an hour, I picked about one and a third tubs' worth of flowers.

Over the next few days, as Don and I worked to get the property ready for cows, I yanked flowers whenever I saw them, probably enough to fill another tub at least.

There's no possible way I got every flower, of course, but there's some comfort in knowing I prevented several hundred thousand seeds from forming in the first place.

The battle continues ... and probably will for as long as we live here.

The wonderful world of weeds

Last spring, our first spring here in our new home, we noticed a lot of thistles growing. Nasty things, thistles.

So I started digging them up using a hand weeding tool. It's laborious on-your-knees work, and it was also an exercise in futility. There were zillions of thistles scattered hither and yon. Trying to lever them out of the ground one by one was impossible. We didn't want to go around spraying poison, but I can certainly understand why people do.

It wasn't just thistles. Having now completed an entire growing season, we discovered the horrors of hound's tongue. Not only does this plant have nasty burrs that take great delight in leaping across the space-time continuum for the simple pleasure of clogging one's socks or matting a dog's fur, but the leaves are poisonous to livestock as well. ("Ingestion can cause severe illness and possibly death in horses, swine, and cattle. The alkaloids are potent liver toxins that under some conditions can be carcinogenic...")

Here's a close-up of the hound's tongue nutlets, not yet dried out. Nasty, aren't they?

So weed control is on our radar.

Last May, rather impulsively, we purchased a four-claw stand-up weed puller made by Fiskars (a brand associated with high-quality scissors). To be honest, I didn't have a lot of hope for this product, but I was anxious to tackle the thistles, and at $56, it wasn't going to break the bank.

Their product description seemed ideal for what we needed: "The Fiskars® stand-up weeder makes it easy to permanently remove invasive plants without sore knees from kneeling, back ache from bending or harsh, costly chemical herbicides that need to be applied multiple times. Just place the head over a weed, step down on the reinforced foot platform, and the four serrated, stainless-steel claws will grab the weed by the root for clean removal. An offset hand reduces wrist strain, a viewing window in the pedal makes claw placement mistake-free, and an easy-eject mechanism clears the head between uses for quick and easy cleanup."

Here's the foot-pedal and the claws.

You can see how the claws are serrated.

Simply put, the claws grab the plant at the base, and the foot platform levers the plant out by the roots. Sounds simple. But does it work?

Yes. In fact, it works phenomenally well.

Here's the process. Place the claws over the center of the weed:

Step on the foot pedal to make sure the claws are as far down as they can go:

Then lever back and let the weed puller pull the weed.

Voilà. Notice the taproots? This thistle isn't growing back.

This is the gizmo to eject the weed from the claws:

Using this tool is actually quite fun, and it's immensely satisfying ("Die, hound's tongue, DIE!!") to pull up a noxious weed and see the long taproot follow.

Here's some young hound's tongue:

Moments later, it's out of the ground.

Here's another one:

Take a gander at that taproot:

And here's a nice fat thistle that met its demise. Again, notice the taproot:

It even works on young blackberries. A few vines had sprouted near the base of our porch steps.

On impulse, I tried pulling them up with the weed-puller. And it worked! Look at those roots!

This weed puller has its limitations. Since we purchased it in May of last year, by that point many of the thistles were already too large and/or the ground was too dry to sink the claws into it. Nor does it work well in rocky soil, where the claws can't be pushed into the ground. For obvious reasons this tool works best in damp soil when the four claws can be centered over the exact middle of the plant (impossible to do when the thistle is already two feet high).

But here in March, with the snow just off the ground and early weeds starting to grow, it is the absolute perfect time to use it.

We've started parking the weed puller by the gate on the deck, and grab it whenever we take Mr. Darcy for a walk. As we go, we casually lever out any hound's tongue or thistle we see. I've also started taking solo (meaning, without the dog) excursions onto the steeper wooded parts of our property where the hound's tongue is more likely to grow. It's a bit too early in the season yet, but you can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to be vigilant about eradicating this weed from our property.

So there you go. Another tool in our arsenal.