The Never Ending Thistle Battle

This past week we had all the planting done and the cows were all settled into their summer pasture. Things were quiet and for the first time in a while I felt almost, not quite, but nearly caught up and I could focus on some tasks that needed to be done. One of those was thistles. Chopping thistles was one of those jobs I had as a kid that I really hated. It was nearly as bad as picking up rocks but close at least you could tell where you had been at the end of the day.

One thing about being adult is that I get to decide how I am going to control the thistles. Digging is for the birds, or rather teenagers, since I am not a teenager and I currently have no teenagers at home during the day, digging was not an option that was seriously considered. Chemical control seemed like the most prudent means.

I called the Noxious Weed Department to check on the use of one of their sprayers and to get some chemical. Apparently, everyone else in Pottawatomie County had the same idea I did and there was a long list of people waiting on the sprayers and I was at the bottom. Some day I really need to work on that procrastination problem of mine, but that will have to wait until later.

I decided to put a reservation in and to start working on them with our atv and its 25-gallon sprayer. After all, how many could there be? Turns out there is a healthy population of thistles in the pasture I was working on and they seemed to be calling for reinforcements. Feeling optimistic I headed out with the hand nozzle, a full tank of gas and an adequate amount of spray.

I was only a few feet inside the gate when I sudden realized how Don Quixote felt. Funny, I drive by the pasture every day and drive through that gate often and it did not seem like that many. Maybe the atv puts you at a different level and you see more, maybe I drive too fast or quite possibly, and most likely, I have a super strain of thistles that in a day can grow to maturity and produce a flower.

In any case, there were thistles every where I looked and squirting them with the hand nozzle was like fighting a forest fire with a garden hose, but that was all I had so I bravely set off driving and spraying and soon had almost perfected my one-handed driving and spraying technique. In my mind I was driving in a straight line and not missing a single thistle. In reality, I was getting about fifty percent and driving like a drunk of Saturday night. It didn’t take long to realize that I needed larger artillery to fight this war.

That is why it was such a relief to get the call that a sprayer had become available if I was still interested. I assured them I was still very much interested and would be up as soon as possible to pick it up and please set me up with the most lethal thistle spray possible. I retreated to the house but like General McArthur I assured the thistles I would return.

Return I did, armed with a much larger sprayer and a much greater range I waged a renewed war with the thistles. They must have called in back up too or my theory of super thistles is true. As I started to spray I found thistles in places I didn’t think I had them and in numbers much higher than I remembered.

I gleefully filled the sprayer time and time again. Each time I returned I smiled as I turned the valve on and let the thistles have it. It also didn’t hurt that there were plenty of dogwood, locust, hedge, buckbrush and various other invading species in the way. Anything that was not grass was fair game in my eyes. It seems like I get an advertisement about pasture spray once a week and they all have lush green pastures on the cover, I assure you that picture was in my mind’s eye as I circled the pasture time and time again.

By the end of the day I had exhausted my supply of spray which had exhausted my budget for spray earlier. As the sun set, I stood over the empty jugs and looked out upon the horizon at the pasture I had just sprayed with kind of a satisfied feeling. I say kind of because there were areas of the pasture I did not get to and I am sure that much like my hand spraying experience, skippers would become apparent.

However, maybe I had knocked it down to where I could had spray the rest, digging was still a distant option. It might take a lifetime of work but someday I am going to have that pasture look like the cover of the advertisement for the spray I used. Yes, reality will set in but for a moment just let me dream, even Don Quixote had a goal.