Bog Myrtle & Peat

Just as there’s a time for every purpose under heaven, there’s certainly a moment to pull ragwort. Thick mattresses of the stuff have emerged on the fields below the house, and the summer’s been kind to grass and weeds alike. I understand that “weed” is a subjective term, and I have a high opinion of ragwort as a boon for insects and wildlife. Every golden flowering top is littered with butterflies and soldier beetles, and many of the tallest stems have been frayed by roebucks as they pass through the grass under cover of darkness.

I’ve no doubt it’s a fine plant, but there’s no escaping the fact that it’s downright dangerous for livestock when it’s been cut and baled for winter feeding. This late in the season, there’s no chemical or mechanical method to deal with the problem. I can either choose to forgo my entire silage crop and pay upwards of two thousand pounds to buy it from elsewhere, or I can roll up my sleeves and pull it from the ground by hand.

After several days of pulling, I’ve handled something like a quarter of the ragwort. Sometimes the little shoots come easily out from the ground like drinking straws, but other clumps are heartily well-established like shrubs in a garden. These have to be ripped out one stem at a time, breaking the rootballs apart in a series of calculated tugs. With the reek of bitter sap in your palms, it soon becomes a weary job.

And just as you wouldn’t cut grass in the rain or burn heather when the hill’s gone over, the act of pulling ragwort has conditions of its own. When it’s too dry, the plants won’t come up and the clumps are hard to break. Too wet and the leaves are all slippery; your hands rip along the stems and blisters rise like molehills. Besides, if you can pull the wet plants up at all, you find that grand clumps of soggy soil come along for the ride  – and if you’re moving ragwort to heaps or barrows around the field margin, the weight of that work becomes the pointless, tiresome carting of mud from one location to another. 

The best conditions are shortly after rain when the leaves are plump and smug, lost the heavy bead of water. That’s when they come out with a rip like damp card, and you can dump them lightly in stacks as if they were sheaves of corn. And when the weather’s right, it’s almost fun to do this work – I haven’t yet lost the novelty of it. But I know that’ll change over coming days as the rains ride in from the west and boredom slips in. I’ll realise that the work I’ve set myself is more than I can handle, and I’ll never clean the thirty acre meadow before the mowers come. So I’ll start to select pick ragwort only from areas of grass that I can’t afford to lose, and like so many of my best-intentioned plans, the result will end in compromise.