Drought and Poison Pasture Plants

Poison Hemlock- kill this weed whenever you see it - even use harsh herbicides if you must, it is that bad for you, your children and your pets.

We moved to our farm in 1955 when I was just four years old.  My Dad took his day off from his medical practice on Thursdays and he devoted the day to chores on our farm. He and my mother kept a small herd of Hereford cattle, some chickens and a small herd of sheep.  We kids went with him while he mended fences and walked the fields checking on the cattle. Those trips around the farm are what developed our love of nature. 


Ground cherries, one of the poisonous nightshade family of plants. We love some of the non-poisonous ones such as white potatoes and tomatoes.

While we walked the fields my Dad would pull up weeds, cursing under his breath and naming them as we walked.  Canadian thistles were always a problem and he worked diligently to root them out. But his most hated were things like milkweed, jimson weed and horse nettle, another of the deadly nightshade family.  We learned to pull those weeds whenever we saw them and to never ever put anything we found in the pastures in our mouths.  Dad wanted to keep those weeds out of the pastures just in case a cow or sheep got a hold of one by mistake. They were all poisonous to our livestock. We worked diligently at eradicating those weeds and to my knowledge Dad never lost an animal to poisoneous plants.





We all love to blow these fluffy seeds in the wind, but don't do it!! Yes butterflies like the flowers but the plant is poisonous to livestock and those seeds scatter and grow everywhere.

 



Drought causes most of us some distress because our flowers, lawns and vegetable gardens all suffer from lack of rain.  It causes crop farmers stress because their crops don't grow well or not at all. Livestock farmers worry about our animals having enough pastures grasses to eat, but we also have to worry about  poisonous weeds that may have been crowded out by lush grasses and clovers in good rain times, but thrive when those same grasses and clovers go dormant in drought times. 

This fall my sister lost one of her  sheep to poisonous plants.  Her sheep are very old and don't like to travel far to graze.  When their pastures began to dry out and go dormant in late August, they traveled a little farther afield then usual and found some still green ground cherries and poison hemlock that had snuck into a small, seldom used corner of their pasture.   A trip with one of the sheep to Ohio State Veterinary hospital confirmed the problem.  Blackie died of a lack of thiamine (one of the B vitamins) , a critical nutrient in sheep. The thiamine was blocked from her system by the poison in the hemlock and the ground cherries.  The poison made her brain swell, blocking her optic nerve and causing sudden blindness. Then it went to work on her central nervous system and caused her to loose the use of her legs. A younger sheep might have survived with emergency treatment, but Blackie was over 20 years old and her system couldn't recover.

Needless to say, my sister went after those plants and destroyed them. More drought is predicated for 2013 and you can be sure we will all be walking out fence rows and pastures this coming spring, summer and fall rooting out any of these poisonous plants.