Buttercups - what to do?

[Cates123]

Is anyone else dealing with a sudden burst of buttercups? We have about 6 acres for only 3 horses at present and so most has been rested for a while and those acres have now erupted in buttercups. There is good grass on the field so my hope is that the horses will eat that not the buttercups when turned out on the new fields (after spring), but is there anything that can be done in the short term?

In the longterm, how do people stop this? We did a dedicated spraying to try to battle the growth a couple of years ago but it's clearly not worked.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

 

[Hepsibah]

Sheep grazing for a couple of years got rid of our buttercup problem completely.

 

[spacefaer]

Your dedicated spraying got rid of the plants that were growing but not the seeds in the ground. You need several years of spraying to get on top of a perennial weed.
Horses tend not to eat them but can get nasty blisters from them.
I've also controlled ours through topping them once they're exposed by the horses eating the grass down

 

[spacefaer]

Sheep grazing for a couple of years got rid of our buttercup problem completely.

My neighbour has so many buttercups, it's currently a sheet of yellow with no visible grass. He only has sheep

 

[Hepsibah]

I wonder what it was then.

 

[Trouper]

I think you need to lime it. You have to create a hostile soil for them - not just get sheep to graze the tops off. If there is too much bare soil then new ones will just blow in and seed - weeds are the greatest opportunists - so you may need to go through a re-seeding process as well.

 

[millitiger]

Do a soil analysis and check pH firstly.

Then spraying, I use Envy.
I think you need to use for a few successive seasons to get on top of it.

 

[Cates123]

Thanks - all great ideas that I'll look into. Such a pain!

 

[poiuytrewq]

Lime. I don’t think it’s cheap but definitely works. When we moved to the farm where we live they actually had a contractor in to lime the land.
He came with what looked like a steam engine (without steam!)
I’m assuming that was a huge scale lime operation though but the driver was telling me all about it!
We so far don’t have any buttercups.