Creeping buttercups taking over!

Are buttercups an indicator species? If so for what? What are the uses? I have several acres with which to work. Thanks!

Water logged acidity and low organic matter. There bad browse for mamals as it causes blisters, my rabbits of had some dried the ducks can eat it but only when starved of greens. They won't get it under control by any mean's, what you have is an opportunity for bee's right now between the early nectar sources and the late onces comes buttercup by the yellow droves to carry the bee's through a wet late spring when everything else that flower's is gone in a week. You can't mulch with buttercups unless you have a total soil barrier or have dried them severely, there a wonderful fire barrier but i've had plenty continue growing when thrown in a bucket that collected rainwater. They really can take inundation and drought really well. You might as well put bee's over it and get a honey yield cuzz bee's or no bees it's going to seed and grow insanely from the rhizomes. The only way i've found to to suppress it and their seeds is to solarize the ground for a summer then pull off to trigger germination then solarize it again all winter, but that's no broad scale solution. They can be anywhere between 6 inches to 2 feet tall depending on how happy they are, the only thing i've noticed seems to hold them back is potato's but you have to block their spring head start.

How do buttercups affect pigs?

buttercups are poison, but some animals will eat them to regulate health situations..our dog used to eat them ..

I'm gunna try the rabbit's on it probably dried at first in volume then try it fresh and check for diarrhea, Creeping Buttercup is the least poisonous of the buttercups and would make a great forage and last into the winter.
http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/organicweeds/weed_information/weed.php?id=3
Although it is usually avoided by stock creeping buttercup is more palatable than the other buttercups and may be grazed. However, it can cause diarrhoea in sheep and cattle. Creeping buttercup is said to deplete the land of potassium and may have an allelopathic effect on neighbouring plants.
Creeping buttercup plants are attacked by a number of insects, fungi and grazing animals. Partridges, pheasants and wood pigeons eat the seeds. Chickens and geese readily eat the leaves. Creeping buttercup tolerates rabbit grazing but growth becomes more prostrate.

Ive had luck out competing them with many plants.Fragaria mochata(musk strawberry)is probably the most productive competition.More invasive plants like perennial chervil or cow parsnip will do it to.

I merged your stuff with the following thread. I hope that is okay by you.

I live in bude, Cornwall SW England.
We have a few acres and we have a couple of horses.
Our problem is that creeping buttercup takes over in the summer and the horses will not eat buttercups I have heard they are poisonous to most grazers, so I'm looking for a permaculture approaxh to get rid of the buttercups without the traditional method of plowing and liming the fields.

Would appreciate and experience or help.

Joe

I've beaten it in small areas using wood chip mulch - the roots only bind loosely, so they become easy to pull up. This works great in cultivated beds and around fruit trees, but not really viable on the scale of a pasture.

Patrick Whitefield's book The Living Landscape suggests that the reason buttercups tend to take over is because animals graze around them, giving them an unfair advantage. He has controlled them by regular mowing, which removes that advantage.

I merged your stuff with the following thread. I hope that is okay by you.

I’m having a lot of creeping buttercup taking over my small 1 acre pasture.  What is a good way to get rid of it without putting poison down.  It is in a low spot That stays pretty damp primarily but it is spreading up I’ve found it in about 1/4 of the pasture. It is about 20-30yards from a small pond.

Chickens love buttercups, so I have used chicken tractors to take out buttercups, cause disturbance to bring up grass seed from the natural seed bank, and fertilize the ground to produce some of the best pasture on my property. It also produced some very tasty meat chickens

I actually have been putting chickens on the less dense areas but I was under the impression that buttercups are mildly toxic to animals.

I haven't had any issues with that for chickens. My understanding is the toxicity in buttercups is towards ruminants....my cows and sheep know not to eat it.

Creeping buttercup is only mildly toxic, if at all. Which is good, because our pasture is full of them. Our stock will happily graze them when they're tall and lush but don't bother with ground huggers. They like wet ground and acid soils, and are an indicator of both of these conditions. Getting more organic matter in the soil will fix the former problem, and some lime or wood ash can help with the latter. They're also a pioneer plant on disturbed and bare ground, so improving cover will crowd them out over time.

Lime is meant to help but don't count on it, I have pH8.5 on well drained sandy soil and it takes over here to. Horses won't eat it if they are given any choice which is good as it is not good for them at all so it tends to take over horse pastures, which mine was.

Two options. Endless hand weeding - you need to get the whole root, not just hoe the tops. Or nukes.

They are my absolute least favourite weed, worse than bindweed even.

I’ll see if I can find some because this hand pulling is killing me, their roots pull back.

Kelli Boggs wrote:I actually have been putting chickens on the less dense areas but I was under the impression that buttercups are mildly toxic to animals.

I think it might depend on the variety of buttercup, too. On Green Deans', Eat the Weeds site, he mentions that some buttercups are more toxic than others (http://www.eattheweeds.com/buttercups/).

Of the 2,252 species in the family and some 600 buttercups in the genus perhaps a dozen and a half squeak into the edible realm.  

My ducks and geese and chickens do eat buttercup...but they don't love it. They'd far prefer dandelion or grass or other weeds. They've eaten all the dandelion plants by my house, but there's still a lot of buttercup. In fact, there's a lot of buttercup most everywhere on my property. Though, not too much inside their yards. Perhaps the calcium they poop out has contributed to making it more alkaline over the years? I've noticed that I have more plantain in my duck yard than anywhere else, and no buttercup now (there used to be a lot), so the calcium/alkalinity might be helping.

When I put my chickens in an area with buttercup, they ate most everything else, and turned up the soil. This made it easier to remove the buttercup that was there...but it very quickly came back!

Maybe Kelli has a species of buttercup that is more tasty to chickens than mine. Or maybe her chickens are a lot less picky!

 

In all seriousness, I have cleared buttercups from relatively small areas that are being used for vegetable gardening. Key steps:

Leave no hiding places. Even a single small plant is enough for them to recolonise and area. In our case it meant removing all grass areas from between raised beds and leaving earth/woodchip paths.

We tilled the area using a mantis tiller. It doesn’t kill them, but loosens the soil sufficiently that subsequent hand weeding is simple. Follow up with picking over the area once a week to pull out the whole plants by their roots as they resprout.

Once the area is essentially clear it can be maintained by liberal uses of deep mulch to keep the soil loose. Any new plants that emerge can be easily hand pulled in their entirety.

My mulch sadly grows buttercup like no one's buisness. But, it is MUCH easier to pull out of than pulling it from compacted ground. A three-pronged hand cultivator comes in really handy for clearing them out of beds.

This year I've spent a lot of time in just daily monitoring of my beds to pull out those little runners that the buttercups love to send up and over my garden bed boarders and into my garden bed!

I merged your stuff with the following thread. I hope that is okay by you.

any advice please on getting rid of buttercups in pasture (for horses)

Buttercups in horse pastures were always considered to be a sign of overgrazed, horse-sick pasures that were becoming acidic when I was a horse keeper. The general advice then was to rest the land, apply something like calcified seaweed to reduce the acidity, and reduce grazing pressure.

Thank you. To elaborate we’ve had the land 2.5 years now and buttercups already established and now seem to be increasing. 11 acres. Probably about 8 as paddocks. 3 horses: 1 massive shire. 1 medium large Clydesdale cross  and a uk native mix pony. So we’re good on acreage per horse. To our knowledge however it has been as pasture for about 30 years and probably overgrazed by sheep. Prior to that hop gardens for decades. Heavy clay. All ideas welcome please 😀

Liming and fertiliser is meant to help but I wouldn't expect it to do much to be honest, I have 30cm deep soil direct onto chalk and buttercup is everywhere, my fields were overgrazed horse pasture so it's to be expected I suppose.

My pastures at the new place were covered in buttercups when we arrived this past Spring.

They are still there a little now but mostly gone already.

All I did was mow them down before the flowers went to seed. Let the grasses grow high for the Summer… mixing every time it got about knee high. Which took forever for most of the Summer since the grasses were so weak from overgrazing.

At the end of the Summer I let the grass grow high one more time and left it.

There is very little buttercup left out there now.

I will soon cut that grass short, and put it in the raised beds. Then heavily overseed the pasture with ruminant grasses and legumes.

Wish I had done that last Fall… I did in two patches and the new grass is thriving and green.

I will continue the tall/mow cycle until mid Summer again. By then we may get an animal or two to start light grazing. May wait until next year though if the grass is not matured yet.

I live in a heavily rained area though. This would take longer somewhere drier.

Edit: I just finished doing a bit of research. It depends on what type of Buttercup you have. I think I may have one of the annual variants. Which is why growing the grass tall and thick by the end of Summer seems to have kept it from germinating much in the field. It is a Winter annual… that blooms in the Spring.

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