Weeding And Wildflowers

Hello, MyFarmers. We're out in Folly field with our multi-talented forester, Simon. Folly field, because we're right near the folly. If you come and walk on the estate, you can walk up here. But Simon, you're very busy out here. What are you doing? And why? Well, we've been pulling ragwort out. I won't take this one. There we are. We've been pulling ragwort, which is that one. If we cut this for hay and we left that in there, not a lot of it, a little bit wouldn't matter, but if we left a lot of it, that's poisonous, once it dries, to a lot of stock. OK When it's green, the sheep can actually eat it, but... Poisonous "makes them sick"? Or poisonous "kills them"? No, poisonous makes them dead. OK It affects the liver apparently. And the other one we're pulling out, which isn't really poisonous, but is a bit of a pain, are the docks. There are quite a few different species. These are quite young, because we did this two years previously, so we're just sweeping back through, and sometimes we can get roots nearly three feet long. So I know docks, I mean as a good Cub Scout you can have a dock leaf to rub on your stings. Is that the same thing? Well, yes it is. But this one, see this one is called a curled leaf dock leaf. It's much smaller. It's a lot smaller. The broad leaf dock we don't get in here so much. It's this type we get, and it can produce lots and lots of seeds, so if we can keep on top of it, at least you keep the meadow fairly clean then. AnFarming question -- why are you doing this all by hand? Why wouldn't you use a big mower? Right. Well a mower doesn't actually kill it. The mower... I suppose the best way to do this... is the mower comes along... It does it a bit more efficiently than that. Yeah, I'm not going round biting it. But it cuts it off like that. Don't try that at home kids. Ragwort's poisonous. Yeah, don't do that. Well, it was a dock I was only biting. That leaves that, so all this will re-grow again, because it's got the roots. And you can see that these are only a year old, so it's already got flowers down there, so it never kills it. So it will just come back. So what we do is, with these we can...actually with ragwort you can almost pull out by hand. We have certain different tools. This one, it goes in here, and certainly with a dock it goes in there, and it just lifts it out. With the really big ones, it's really good to pull a big one, you go like that, and it goes "pop", and up it comes. It's quite satisfying. But the reason why I do that, if you look around, there isn't that much dock in here, and that's simply because for quite a few years now we've been pulling them out. This is about ten hectares, probably between me and Neil, who is down there pulling some up, we've done ten hectares in a day. We used to use "Pastor" which is a broad leaf killer, and used to broad spray it, but the trouble is with that it kills all of the wild flowers and it costs sixty pounds a hectare in chemicals, so that would be six hundred quid, plus the tractor and sprayer's time, so like seven hundred and fifty quid. Charge Neil and me out for a hundred and fifty quid each, or anybody pulling this, a hundred and fifty quid out for the day, that's three hundred quid. The economics actually make sense to do it by hand, it's just that people don't realise that, not until you start spending the money on chemicals. Speaking of money, this is on a farm. Why wouldn't we just not bother with the grass, and just have weeds or oil seed *** or whatever we voted for recently? Why wouldn't you farm this? Well actually it was like this a long time ago, and then it got converted into an arable field, and we got it back in hand from the tenant. We restored it back to the park land because it's part of the Grade 1 listed park and how it was always meant to look. So actually the reason why it's like this now is more because of the historic park land. However, in the meantime, you can also make it flower-rich, which also encourages a lot more wildlife back into the park land. We're going to come back to the wild flowers in a minute. Hopefully you can tell us a bit more about some of them. But interestingly as well, speaking about tenants, next door, as the MyFarmers will be able to see in the background, that's oil seed ***, farmed by one of our tenants conventionally... Yes. ...so sprayed with chemicals, and treated with fertilizers and all those sort of things. Does that have an effect on this? This is right next door. Not really because mostly now most good farmers will have the right equipment. Because also chemicals are so expensive and fertilizer is so expensive, that you don't want to waste it. So what you do is, you have machines that now apply it in a much more targeted way, so you don't get... you shouldn't get... you shouldn't go out on windy days and most of them don't, any responsible farmer doesn't, and so you don't get the drift and you don't get the sort of splash over on to the places like here. So, no, especially if you have got a small buffer strip towards it as well. It's a bit like this one behind us. You can see that one. That's a sort of little buffer strip so that will absorb any spill that might come over this way. It works quite effectively. Simon, you're going to tell us a bit more about some of the wild flowers we've got over here in Folly field as well. We're going to save this beautiful one until last, but what have you got there? I'll start off with the clovers because these are all wild clovers that I've got. That one's a red one. So with wild clovers, they tend to have...well they do have more nectar in the flower, so there's much more...it's much better for the bumble bees and other insects, rather than the commercial ones, which they have sort of bred that out and they've bred it more for fixing nitrogen. So that's the wild red clover. Yep. This one...well, I'm going to ask you on these two. There are two sorts there. Yeah. What's the difference? That one's a bit yellowier, and that one's a bit whiter. Right. I'm a botanist (laughing). That's white clover. That's wild white clover, so it could even be... it comes under sort of King clover or something, but again it has got a lot more nectar value in it. Now this yellow one, that's actually a very good speciality for this area, which is on boulder clays, and that's called Sulphur clover and you can see why because it's a bit more yellow. It's actually...apparently it's been declining for quite a while, but we have quite a lot of it moving into the field up here and dotted around the estate. This is reasonably common, but not abundant. OK. OK, so that's a very important clover. MyFarmers will be familiar with clover... Yeah, but there's also the wild ones, which is a big distinction. Sure. Then we've a whole load of other ones. There's another one that looks clover-ish and which should always be in meadows and this one's called Self-heal, and I seem to remember that it's called Self-heal because you can...it will heal wounds up. I don't see that very often. The next thing is...let's have a look at that white one. This is just flowering now, so that's a wild carrot. The insects love that. The bumble bees and other bees don't particularly like that. This is more for short-tongued insects and small ones... Yep. ...and they really, really love wild carrot, and if you have wild carrot you always see lots of insects on it. And then we've got...there's a nice one. This one's called Yellow Wort. And it's a sort of...it's an annual, I think, I can't remember now, I forget so much...but it's a nice yellow flower. It closes up when it's not sunny, but when it is sunny it all comes out and it's a big display. This one, which has got sticky seeds on it, so it gets on the wool, which is a bit annoying actually -- you wouldn't want too much of that where you've got sheep. It's called Agrimony and that's a really lovely plant. It's got a nice big bush in the bottom and it forms great big sort of long spikes with yellow flowers. That's really pretty. Then we've got...let's deal with this one. This is Bird's Foot Trefoil. Say that one again. Bird's Foot Trefoil. Right. This one you can use the same with clovers to fix nitrogen. It's a legume, and that's well worth having in. Another plant...OK let's deal with those two last of all. Another plant is this one which is Lady's Bedstraw. Go on, give it a smell. Yeah, smells sort of...English meadow-y. Really nice, yeah. Well this one, the ladies before they had perfumes and things would put this under their beds and in their laundry areas to give it a sweet smell. And it is, it's got a beautiful smell. I hope my wife can't smell that on me (laughing). Yeah (laughing). And then the last two we've got...there's lots more out there, but I've picked a selection. This one, I've used this one to alter meadows. So if you've got meadows that are nutrient-rich and the grasses are out-competing the flowers, then we put Yellow Rattle in, and that parasitizes the grass and it knocks the grass back a bit. OK. But the trouble with Yellow Rattle is that if you've got a field full of grass only, the next couple of years it's full of Yellow Rattle because the wild flowers aren't there to fill in the gaps. Yep. That's this as well, isn't it? You've already been teaching me. This is what it looks like when it's all dried out. Yeah, that's seeded now. I see this everywhere. Now I know what it is. Well it's an annual as well, so you could easily get rid of it by mowing it early. It gets lost very quickly, but again the bumble bees love this one. Yep. But a very useful tool if you want to turn a bit of grass into a hay meadow even at home. You've always got to use Yellow Rattle and then with some other flower seeds to make up for the gaps. And it's principally because the grass gets lower and the little flower seedlings can get going. Because that's a semi-parasitic plant, and apparently so is this one. Yep. Now this one's called Red Bartsia and this actually is used...some quite rare bees use this one. In fact there's one bee and all it uses is Red Bartsia and it's rare because there isn't an awful lot of it, you know, in sort of conventional farming areas, but here we've got quite a lot, but we haven't found the bee yet. But it will probably end up here eventually. So that's another sort of apparently semi-parasitic plant on grasses. There you go, MyFarmers. Lots of stuff about wild flowers, so I expect you to be able to come and visit Wimpole and identify these all for yourself. Come on then Simon. What's this beautiful one here that's left over? This one. Well it's an orchid and it's a late flowering orchid, so...we've got bee orchids over there, but they've gone over. They've already flowered and they're just almost finished setting seed. This one is called a Pyramid orchid and it is very difficult to get that one to really go in...it will go into the hay meadows, but because we cut normally in sort of mid June, late June, then it doesn't get time to seed, so what is it now? It's mid June, isn't it? July. Sorry, July, the 20th of July tomorrow. So that's not even seeded, so that will probably need another couple of weeks before that seeds, but most farmers would be desperate to get the hay in this year, so it's one of the wayside really, in short grass lands. So all of these things have benefited from your hard work, doing stuff by hand rather than with great big mowers? Yes, well, yes it does. I mean oddly enough you...yeah, it does benefit...they do benefit, but it can only be in small areas because you can't do all...the sort of work I do here, it's targeted to the best meadows. I won't do it in all of them. If there's not much in it...so on the left hand side of the Folly field, there are different things and you don't get this, like on this bit it's sloping and it was seeded as a sort of semi-wild flower area or grass land, because it was a grass land, really no flowers, and then all the flowers have slowly snuck in and I've helped out a little bit with plants from the side of the roads. Great. Thanks Simon. We'd better go. Let you get on with your weeding before my knees give up. 5