How Letting Mother Nature Reclaim Prime Farmland Produced Breathtaking Results

25 April 2018

 - With breathtaking speed, thickets of 3ft-high thistles were advancing over the ground, engulfing acre after acre. It was like the Day Of The Triffids. Every day, as my husband Charlie and I walked over what had once been arable fields on our family farm, we could barely believe what we were seeing.

Not for nothing is this creeping weed known as the ‘cursed thistle’ — it sends out deep tap-roots and, as any gardener knows, it’s almost impossible to dig out. In our case, however, using weedkiller was out of the question.

Several years into a pioneering project to ‘rewild’ the land, we were no longer willing to use the pesticides, fungicides and artificial fertilisers that had once seemed so essential.

Giving up intensive farming on our 3,500 acres had been a difficult, but unavoidable, decision; on desperately poor soil — heavy clay — we rarely made a profit and had worked up an eye-watering overdraft.