Blown Away

[The Natural Philosopher]

Two methofs have worked for me.

(i) slash, burn, and mow, and keep mowing.

(ii) use of glyphosate at between 10 and 100 times recommended strength sprayed on to newly sprouting stuff.

This generally kills it stone dead, but don't mess around with 'recommended' strength.

And wera protective clothing and keep pets away and shwoer immediately afterwards etc tec.

Glyphosate.

Not if you use glyphosate it won't. The whole are will be bramble free (and everything else free too).

Just reseed with meadow mix or pasture mix or let nature take its course.

Go to a builders merchants.

Another option is to hire a digger, and dig the bastards up.

Then use the blade to regrade.

Or rotovate.

Seripusly, don'y mess around. Use drastic tactics. Nazi style 'final solutions' are required for proper 'ethnic cleansing'

If chemsitry bother you, use digger to buldoze to ground level, and a ride on mower with (essentially disposable blade in year one) to mulch anything left to silage, and then keep mowing - high setting is fine for pasture - at least once every couple of months. Eventually the bastarads give up, but they will always re-seed, which is why biannual mowing of pasture is de rigeur. Thistles and brambles and hawthorn seeds come on on the wind and in birdshit.

[Andy Dingley]

Get a chap in. They're ready equipped with billhooks, gloves, chipper and a pickup to drag the mess away afterwards. If you use the right people (I can give you a recommendation for Bristol) then the cost looks reasonable against the hire and disposal charges for DIY.

If you do DIY, then you need to be properly tooled up to do it. This includes a real billhook (minimum 50 years old) - tenner from eBay (search for "mrayre" as a seller) and ideally a long-handled slasher too. Get a scythe stone too. If it's hawthorns rather than brambles, I prefer my khukri (army issue) as it will cut a thicker branch than a straight billhook.

Also useful if you're doing this in the green season is a paraffin weed burner, to wilt the greenery a week before you attack the stems. Glyphosate will do it too, but is nothing like so much fun.

For gloves, welding gauntlets are nice and long, but I usually wear "Panda" brand cloth-backed rigger gloves for heavy stuff (dark brown and yellow) as they're far more heavily made than the old pale green chrome leather jobs. Shiny buckskin surfaced gloves look nice, but they rip up on thorns in no time.

Once you have brambles down to stumps, dig them out. Good rootstocks will make you a friend with any carver or woodturner. Glyphosate the remnants.

I _wouldn't_ run a rotovator over it, at least not immediately. Chopped rootstock on healthy plants can re-grow. You want it well starved and dead before you chop it up. Hanging before quartering.

[Mike]

Plough the whole field and start again, then weed out new growths and they will usually give up after a season. This is also the best way to get back to a grass paddock anyway.

[Mike]

I really wouldn't suggest this if there's a watercourse anywhere nearby. Also if you are in a rural area, all fields are being aerial surveyed every year from now on for the CAP replacement scheme so if you were unlucky the 'scene of devastation' would be caught on camera.

[Andy Dingley]

You don't understand how glyphosate works do you ? Why increase the strength so massively ?

[John]

Use proprietary "Brushwood killer" which is basically 2-4-D herbicide and will leave the (any) grass unharmed. Liable to be quite expensive though. Do you feel like a lot of theraputic slashing and burning?

[Michael Mcneil]

What is the paddock for?

With brambles near a wall or fence you just pull them out when they are full of fruit. That way you don't get bunching with live and dead stems making harvesting difficult. And you're left with tender new growth that can be trained up the wall or along the fence.

Actually in the field mowing will eradicate them as it will with nettles, thistles and docks -eventually.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Actually its not as devastating as you think. With a hand sprayer it really is only the actual bush and what drips off underneath, and I am pretty sure that glyphosate is relatively harmless almost as soon as it hits the soil.

If you are fussy paint it on a few leaves, neat. That is the best of all.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Because experience shows that brambles sparyed with 'garden DIY' strength just poke two fingers at you, brambles sprayed with x10 mostly die back but the roots don't die, and brambles sprayed with greater concentrations die back and don't sucker.

I have no idea how it works, but having used it for years now, I know that heavier concentratins kill brushwwood better.

On grass and weeds its a different matter. They die at the merest touch.

[Michael Mcneil]

If you have a thicket of live and dead stuff load it with wads of newspaper on the next dry day and burn all the dead stuff off. All the live stuff will recoup for friuit at the end of summer. Any garden gloves will be OK on live stems it is the sere stuff that is hard and brittle. It is the brittle stuff that festers.

[Ian White]

First of all, thanks to everyone for the helpful answers so far.

Big radio aerials, mostly, which will involve laying an extensive earth mat, just below the surface. That is the immediate reason why I need the brambles out. The nobler aim is to reclaim the area from recent neglect, and return it to grass as the dominant ground cover.

BTW, it does have scattered trees, and already has some areas that have been reclaimed to grass. For both of those reasons, full-scale ploughing is not an option. Even rotavating the brambled areas would be a mistake, because it would spread thousands of bits of living root (BTDT with other weeds, and very much regretted it). After the roots are dead, there will be no need to rotavate anyway - I'd only want to remove any stumps that could get in the way of the mower.

[tony sayer]

Coo!, What are U using that for a medium wave transmitter?...

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh. Thn hire a mini digger, and simply scrape off the topsoil, pile it in a corner together with any trashy brambles, lay your mat, and re-ceover with topsoil.

If you simply then mow the result regularly, it will become fair lawn.

The digger will also make a fair stump remover for any bigger trash that needs claering.

Brambles do not survive having roots decimated.

Other weeds will, but conatsnt mowing will finally eliminate all but the ususal suspects - buttercups, danadelions, daisies and the like. These can be knocked over with specific weedkillers if you can be bothered.

>

[Huge]

Aha! What's your callsign?

de G0CNR. (Very inactive)

[Huge]

Half-wave on Top Band? (180M)

[Mike]

DEFRA lists it as a controlled substance. In view of the concentrations I had images of you spraying the whole field in a back to ground zero approach but I suppose applied carefully it's fine.

[Andy Dingley]

Used to be, it's a lot more easily available these days (Roundup)

Dangerous stuff. There's a lot of surfactant in that bottle and if you were to drink it, it's the _surfactant_ that's the dangerous part. Unless you're a member of the vegetable kingdom (so IMM had better be careful), then it's really pretty safe.

OTOH I saw a tub of labelled "paraquat antidote" last week - fuller's earth ! If that's the best "antidote" they can offer, then you're pretty screwed. It's a less reassuring treatment than even calcium gluconate gel.

[Colin]

I tried Glysophate but had no luck. (Admittedly, not in these dilutions.) The solution I found was to fence the area with an electric fence and stick a couple of borrowed pigs in the area. The ground was 'organically' cleared and nicely turned-over within a month or so.

Colin

[The Natural Philosopher]

Good lord no!

The stuff acts by getting into teh plant. Brambles are big tough plants with leathery leaves. They don't absorbe well. Hence high concentrations on a few bits are better than an overall mist.

Ive actually done the rubber gloves/paintbrush/fulls strength painted on/ bit on selected leaves. This is the only way to go when the buggers are mixed up with wanted hedges etc. And beware of drips.

If its just a question of clearing an area of scrub - well a digger equipped with a small bucket to hoick out the roots, plus a blade to scrape the loose stuff off first, is an enjoyable days work.

Once the big lumps are removed, and the topsoil spread around, grass comes very quickly.

Then its ride on mower in perpetuity...

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is interesting to hear too.

I always wondered how teh legenrdary pig lifetsyle would leave a plot...

In my case it was tyeh mathematics. The cost of fencing vastly exceeded teh cost of a digger for a day or two. Even when the value of the sausages was taken into account.

Ive done or garden in bits. But the hugely strong weedkiller cleared one pattch so completely it simply naver has reappeared. That was INSIDE OF a hedge. Couldn't get a mower there. (ditch)

Where its IN the hedge we recourse to painting it on, and cutting out the stems once it goes manky and shrivelled. This works mostly, but any drops on the hawthorn etc cause severe damage to that.

Regular mowing on the ride on takes care of any suckers and other problems inside the garden. That is simply not a problem - just cut to teh level that the ride on can cope with, and let the mulching blades do teh rest.