Stories from the farm June 26

One thistle covered in fungi next to an unaffected one

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Newsletter by Laurel:

Longer term receivers of this newsletter may recall from time to time my minor obsession with the rise and fall through time and space of the farms population of thistles, the creeping thistle in particular. As one of the cohort of legally defined 'injurious weeds" it gets a pretty bad rap and it can certainly be a very rapid coloniser of grass and crop fields and is rather punishing to walk through in thick stands and thin trousers. As we transition the farm further into the quick moving grazing system I'm enjoying watching how many different plants are responding to pulses of grazing and animal impact in contrast to the traditional sustained moderate intensity grazing. We're only a few years in and I suspect the dynamics of plants population flux and succession will need years if not decades to develop more fully but I'm already finding it enormously absorbing. The contrast with the conventional agricultural paradigm which we were taught and practiced of a good field being a uniform and 'clean' crop could not be more extreme. Learning to love heterogeneity in an agricultural context even for a naturalist who finds happiness in diversity is remarkably challenging.

So I spend rather a lot of time amongst farm jobs taking erratic detours around fields staring at the plants, thinking, wondering, learning. And every now and then, even from quite early in the spring I get jolted out of my visual absorption by a burst of fragrance. A delicious floral scent always needs locating and sniffing some more so the eyes come up and the nose twitches as I try to locate it. It's the smell of thistle blossom (attractive to a great range of insects as well as me). Only it's early spring, the thistles aren't nearly out yet. But there's nothing in bloom that has a scent. And it is coming from the thistles, some of which are covered in an orange fungal rust. I'm on my knees now in a thistle clump, sniffing infected and non infected thistle plants. The infected plants smell absolutely delicious!

When I first bumped into this phenomenon a few years back I picked some leaves and had a bit of a stare through the microscope and a rummage on the internet. And yes, the fungus (specific to this species of thistle) is known to produce a rich thistle blossom scent presumably as an aid to spore dispersal via insects attracted to the scent. It knocks me back on my heels every spring when I first smell it now. The fungus does have quite an impact of infected plants, much reduced vigour and partial or complete dieback over time and there have been attempts to propagate and apply it as a biocontrol agent to reduce thistle populations in agricultural and conservation settings. In our farm system I see it infecting thistle probably after they've passed their active establishment phase and are perhaps less vigorous, so there is some natural check on thistle domination which has value. That a fungus through a series of random mutations and selections over so many generations could have ended up making and disseminating it's own copy of the blossom scent of it's unwilling host just fills me with wonder and amazement, perhaps that is it's real value! So, another small plus in the ambiguous thistles ledger and a little bit more richness in the life of the farm ecosystem.

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BACK BECAUSE THEY WERE SO POPULAR: Hebridean lamb merguez sausages!! And we also made a new batch of Saddleback Pork Sausages

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