Our homestead has about 20-ish acres of pastureland for cattle. The previous owners had about 20 head of cattle on the property. We have yet to get cattle of our own, but we do lease the land to our neighbor just down the road to rotationally graze some of his cows for the time being.
Now I’m not a pasture expert by any means but one of the first things I noticed in our pastures when we moved in was a plethora of these:
This is thistle. There are many species of thistle and I’m not exactly sure which one this is. What I do know is that it is PAINFUL. Don’t let those pretty purple flowers deceive you. These Siren weeds have sharp thorns that give even the best pair of gloves a run for their money. They are also massive growing 3 to 5 feet in height causing them to choke out the healthy pasture grasses.
And that is why they had to go. Cows can’t eat thistle and the thistle keeps their grass from growing. For weeks my husband and I hacked away at these evil weeds to clear them out. They were especially heavy in the back pastures and along the tree lines. Some of the thistle looked like they had been around for quite a while based on their size. I never thought I would have a use for a machete in my life, but thistle whacking has changed that.
Once we had hacked them down to nubs, we went back over them with a weed killer made for thistle killing. They can have a pretty extensive root system that makes them hard to eradicate completely and is one reason why they are so invasive. Here are our second round of thistle killing tools.
It was a lot of work and pain to clean the massive overgrowth of thistle out, but it got done. Now that Spring is right around the corner we are once again on thistle watch. Their life cycle is to grow rosettes in Winter that then shoot up the spiky stalks with the deceptively pretty flowers in Spring and finally in late Summer let their plethora of seeds fly. Alas, the devil weeds are trying to return. Here are just a couple of the way too many rosettes we have found in our walkabouts. They have been dealt with and we continue to find more. Sigh.
One final interesting note on thistle is that they are edible. I have zero plans to eat any thistle I run across, but the internet does actually have recipes for cooking thistle. Who knew?
Russian thistle - tumble weeds - showed up in feed imports I seem to recall reading somewhere - in an actual book, since I don’t have much experience outside standard small gardening. Good luck clearing those things out!!