Jeremy Hobson solves more of your pastoral problems
Strip for wildlife!
Q Our question is short and sweet! We wonder why some farmers’ weed-kill a strip between their cereal crop and the headland?
A Conservation projects in France (sometimes orchestrated by the EU and, at other times, by government) are often subsidised and are therefore, beneficial to the farmer as much as they are wildlife. Field margins (strips of land lying between the crop and the field boundary) are an important issue and they are deliberately managed in order to create conditions which benefit important farmland wildlife species. They can take a variety of forms. The situation that I think you’ve noticed is the option whereby a 6m-wide ‘wildlife strip’ adjacent to a cereal crop, has to include a 1m-wide ‘sterile strip’ between the wildlife strip and the crop. The wildlife strip is cultivated annually but not cropped – the sterile (weed-killed) strip being maintained so as to help prevent rogue arable weeds spreading from the headland into the adjacent cereal crop.
BAMBOOZLED
Q We have a clump of bamboo in our Loire garden. I keep it from encroaching by pulling up new shoots whenever I see them at their most prolific (usually May-time). My question is: I’d like to use the canes but whenever I’ve cut them in the past, they seem to go brittle very quickly and are not at all like those you buy from garden centres and similar. Why might this be?
A Bamboo canes are best cut in the autumn. Be careful to remove the growths from close to the ground, never shortening a shoot halfway – it must be cut clean away at the base. Dry them, if possible, in a cool covered place with the stems laid flat on the ground… this should all help in making the canes last longer when you put them to use.
One word of warning – please take great care when cutting bamboo canes because the shards of woody growth when split, can cause deep cuts (similar to ‘paper’ cuts) to fingers and hands.
PURPLE POWER
Q On a walk through an olive grove in Provence on holiday last year, my partner and I discovered what looked like bunches of small leeks growing among the trees. We were reluctant to pull some for possible identification… do you know what they could have been?
A It sounds as if, despite being found between olives rather than vines, you came across a patch of the ‘vineyard leek’ or ‘poireau de vigne’ (Allium ampeloprasum). These wild leeks can be found in both vineyards and olive orchards, where they thrive because of the minimum, yet important cultivation of their surroundings. Although perennial, I suspect they will only survive in the milder areas of
