Poisonous plants in wild hay

it's a very windy day today and i am going hunting hunting for ragged [Music] there is ragwort [Music] just one of many i've got to dig out of this field it's known as ragged around here this is a toxic weed which we have to remove from the wild hay meadows it grows in abundance along roadways and in particular along railway tracks and it's an invasive species that have brought in here like so many dangerous plants by the victorians because it looks quite nice apparently it's a garden plant for goodness sake however it is very toxic to all mammals so obviously horses sheep cows everything it doesn't immediately kill them though what it does it does long-term liver damage so if they eat sufficient of this they will basically die and you will see ponies that are on very poor paddocks this is quite prevalent and if they're very very hungry they'll eat it it is very bitter though so a lot of horses won't touch it when it's green the problem is in a hay crop when it's cut it will dry the bitter taste of this plant will go away and then horses will eat it in hay so you have to be particularly careful when you're growing wild hay to get rid of dangerous toxic weeds like this it does have some advantages though ragweed is beloved of at least one kind of creature this cinnabar moth loves this if you are a cinnabar moth or if you are a honeybee this uh these flowers are obviously quite valuable to you it's quite a good supply of nectar so it's not a problem in the right places but it is a problem in hay fields and that's why we dig it out and burn it or throw it away we definitely don't put it on the compost pile because it can turn to seed very quickly and then you'll be spreading seed back on the land so we dig it out you can of course pull weeds out and that then leaves little bits of roots behind and in the medieval period weeding was around this time of year around the middle of the year after you've done the hay harvest you might then weed your uh your crops your legumes your veg your barley your wheat and you would typically pull it out but you wouldn't pull it out by kneeling down as i am because that absolutely takes it out of you what you do is you have a fork stick and little sickle and they're both on sticks and you walk along and you tread the actual plant over and you hook it and you cut it and then those bits are collected and used as extra fodder for the animals so in many ways in the medieval period wild plants weeds as we would call them now were actually used as a form of secondary food but they would have been feeding their animals ragwort of course they would have known about this being dangerous and toxic in particular because it absolutely stinks when you handle this it really smells horrible and that gives it another one of its folklore names which is stinking billy stinking william it really really does smell quite astringent and bad and weirdly that smell goes when it's dry which is why horses will eat it it is toxic to people as well so i've got my gloves on some people even wear face masks to deal with this but uh it's not dry enough really you can identify this in particular because of its upright nature there are other yellow plants in the in the fields around me but once you start to see it you can really identify it from a distance and really interestingly from the top of a horse it's actually particularly easy so when i go riding around the hayfields i look out for this and i wonder whether that was the case in medieval times maybe people would have shouted at their servants at their peasants to go and get rid of the get rid of the ragwort from the fields because i can see it from my horse in particular the yellow flowers are a giveaway it's a particular type of yellow slightly more ocher yellow than some of the other yellow flowers that you get in the landscape initially you can't really see the difference but once you've got your eye in you really can and key characteristic is as i said it's upright growth pattern but also the red parts of the stems here you can see those once you're close enough up you can really see that red color and that's a complete giveaway uh along with all the other components of it the shape of the leaves and that kind of stuff now you can just pick this up you pull it out of the ground but you'll leave around you'll leave a rosette of roots around which will grow up next year so what we're trying to do is get rid of and eradicate the ragwer from the whole of this hayfield so what i'm going to do is dig it up and by digging up i mean literally using a pickaxe i've tried with a spade but doesn't go deep enough literally using a pickaxe to axe it out of the ground sounds like overkill but if you can get a big lump of soil out knock the soil off and everything and fill the divot in because you don't want divots in your field either but you pull it out and it stands less of a chance of growing back one of the little things i do is i take some of the wild grass seeds and sprinkle that into the patch of grass of ground that's left hopefully then the grass will out-compete the herb and we'll just have a patch that's grass again so it's a regular annual event for me ragged hunting and it has to be done because i don't want to risk my horses but i do want to feed them wild organic hay so there's a bit of a balance there's a few days work going backwards and forwards across the landscape with a nice hat on digging stuff out it is actually quite back-breaking work as well though because you're bending over all the time but that is very familiar to most agrarian workers right enough about botany and ragwort and the medieval weeding season i'm going to dig this up and show you how it's done right [Music] so what i'm trying to do is check that the roots have come out fairly intact and then just fill in fill in the divot and then sprinkle seeds back on it right that is one small piece of ragged hunted and pulled out preparation of the hay cutting later now i've just got 26 more acres to do [Music] you

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 80,648

Keywords: history, kingsley, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, Medieval, fantasy, dnd, dungeons and dragons, historical, hema, historical european martial arts, mount and blade, video, game, roleplaying, role playing, rpg, lord of the rings, adventure, adventurer

Id: UsCOEvYJO1M

Length: 8min 43sec (523 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020