The attempted extinction of a plant species
David Bloomfield Hortons, Mascalls Lane, Brentwood, Essex CM14 5LJ
I have recently been in correspondence with one of our leading members about former
ways of managing certain aspects of growing crops, and they suggested I put pen to
paper.
At the present we hear so much about the benefits of organic farming, usually perceived
as putting the clock back at least fifty years. I get increasingly interested in how things
were done yesteryear, but my background screams very loudly at me to remember the
dreadfully low productive fields by today's standards, and the vast amount of hard
manual labour and the large labour force compared to the tiny fraction of today's
standards. I was not there, but I read and listen to the old timers.
Weeds were an over-riding problem. It was true that one year's seed gave seven years
weeds, and one of the worst species that was once said not to produce viable seed was
Twitch or Common Couch Elytrigia (formerly Agropyron) repens. Various things were
tried to suppress this grass. One of the best was said, tongue in cheek, to be growing
good crops to stifle it. The ultimate answer was to fallow the land for a year by ploughing
it every month when conditions were suitably dry, until mid or late summer, when the
soil was made friable and most of the rhizomes were lying on the surface dead or
dying. Then the field was raked and heaps made of the rhizomes, which were burnt as
soon as dry enough. There were many fires to the acre, but this was a very smokey
business and I do not remember ever seeing blazing fires. Another approach I re-
discovered myself was to plough during the frost. Too hard and it was impossible, too
little and you sank in the moist soil underneath. I had a small field on the south side of
which was a hedge on a bank, which shaded the soil to such effect that there was a
colder climate. This affected the crops and gave Twitch the advantage, with all this
area turning green towards the end of the winter after it had been ploughed early the
previous autumn. I was aware that it should be possible to plough it again as the first
frost seemed hard enough to stop me sinking into the moist spoil underneath. I was
amazed when the Twitch subsequently did not re-appear in any quantity again, but did
not think about it until a former farm worker was praising the old ways and mentioned
ploughing in the frost to kill Twitch. It was not very long before I realised what I had
done a year or two before.
A few years later I took over more land, some of which was severely affected by Twitch.
By this time I had a heavier and more powerful tractor as well as reversible plough,
which from a distance is another complete plough above the one that is working, and
at least double the weight. Tractor ploughing is done by running a front and rear
wheel in the furrow, which in less hard frost is of course not frozen and usually very
moist. This causes severe soil compaction with a great risk of getting stuck, but with a
larger tractor came more power, able to pull a deep cultivator at least as wide as the
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 62, May 2010
7