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Old 03-08-2012, 12:57 PM
echinosum echinosum is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: Feb 2006
Location: Chalfont St Giles
Posts: 1,340
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter James[_4_] View Post
You know that no farmer worthy of the name would allow ragwort to grow
in his pastures or hay fields. Every livestock farmer I've ever known,
and I spent a working lifetime selling farm machinery in the West
Country, walked his pastures regularly and inspected them for ragwort
and other injurious plants.
If you do have it, you can manage it but hardly eradicate it. Ragwort is everywhere around where I live. There is scrubland utterly covered in it - the council has insisted the owners regularly mow it, but what else can they do? It is a lawn weed in everyone's garden hereabouts. It grows on the grass verges. And you can't eradicate it from your lawn - I pull up every plant I see - because seeds blow in. The field behind my garden is a hayfield owned by a family who have horses. They mow it and put the hay into haybales. I don't know if they give it to their horses. It has some amount of ragwort in it, but what can they do? You can't walk around a field of several acres pulling up every ragwort plant before mowing it. Very close by are several fields that horses graze on, they apparently manage.