The Canadian thistle is a real invader of lawns. If this unloved plant has taken up residence in your garden, here are some natural remedies to limit its spread. So, ready to get your hands dirty?
What is Field Thistle?
Unlike the slime thistle (carlina gummifera), Canadian thistle (Cirsium arvense) is not poisonous. Moreover, it is not strictly speaking a thistle, but rather aa cissum, a plant with spiny leaves. Unloved by planters and gardeners, it spreads at high speed in lawns, beds, meadows and likes clay and fertile soil. In addition, a single thistle can grow on almost two m² in a year. In addition, it can reproduce 4,000 to 5,000 seeds every year, which is colossal when you know that these have an extremely long germination time.
Note that the flowers appear during the summer and delight bees, bumblebees and others. pollinating insects. In order to promote biodiversity in your garden, it is therefore advisable not to eliminate the thistle during the summer period. However, if your lawn doesn’t look like a thistle field anymore, here are some natural tips (and not harmful to the fauna and flora) to control these “weeds”.
How to get rid of field thistle?
Make a cut
As you will have understood, it is essential to prevent the spread of seeds: stop blooming. To do this, cut off the base of the thistle with a garden knife and pull out the root with a shovel. Be careful, before cutting, plant honey flowers in your garden that attract pollinating insects.
Don’t till the ground
To limit the spread of Canadian thistles in your garden, it is recommended that you: don’t work on the land with a tiller at the risk of cutting the root into several pieces and thus multiplying the new shoots.
Sowing green manure
Before your lawn is overgrown, you can spread green manure such as clover, alfalfa, clover, rye, vetch, etc. This trick is regularly applied in winter to avoid leaving the soil bare during the vegetative rest period and to avoid the development of “weeds” like field thistle.
There you go, you now know how to win the battle against the thistle while preserving the biodiversity in your garden! Moving on, here’s how to get rid of bindweed in the garden.