Weeds weeds weeds

It sometimes feels like we are under siege from the weeds. If we turn our back on an area of the land for more than about 5 minutes it will be engulfed. There are three that feel to be particularly encroaching, brambles, nettles and bracken. All three can be dealt with by regular cuttings, but there is so much area to be covered, it is not possible to do it all by hand. The animals do help, but they cannot do under fence lines, none of them eat bracken (just as well as it is poisonous) and they are not very good at clearing an area already engulfed - although the cows do quite a good job of forcing their way in to things.

Apparently bracken is more likely to be killed by being crushed rather than cut, so we will try that this year in the orchard. We are getting some more pigs who will live in the woods and hopefully crush the bracken there.

The brambles grow so fast it is scary, even over the winter they are green and growing very slowly. We have cut and fed some too the cows which they seemed to enjoy. The fields are slowly developing a few more patches of them as the animals fail to keep up with growth. The fences get engulfed and dragged down if you don't keep an eye on it. I recently went round one of the fields with shears and cut them off the whole fence line. Doug can now go round with the strimmer - if you don't cut the brambles of the fence first you can't see where the wire is and it gets cut through. Ideally we need to go round every field twice a year like this. It is something like 1.5km round that one field, not sure how far round all the fields. Pretty tiring! Maybe one day when the house is finished we will manage it all. 

The nettles, animals will eat them if they can stamp them down a bit and they aren't as numerous as the bracken or as destructive as the brambles but they can make accessing certain places in the summer very painful. We tried eating them, but they are a bit weird and hairy so we haven't bothered again. I may try making nettle pasta at some point. I have heard of people cutting and drying them for winter animal feed. We have also made some fertiliser by letting them sit and fooster in a bucket of water.