Anybody want these?

I spent some time cutting and digging thistles
this morning. I know, I'm a bad farmer for letting
them go this far. I'll do better next time. If
nobody wants these pretty flowers, I might give
them to the mayor as a thank you for the speed
bump.
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No thanks. If I wanted some, I could just go pick them out of the neighbors CRP ground directly across the road from me.
 
You can keep the flowers. Some times I get into them mowing. They are over 6 ft high. They are a little different than the ones you have pictured. I have to pull my legs in. The stickers around the flowers are very sharp, and painful, and will go right through your clothes. Stan
 
When I was a kid guess who had the honor of chopping them down??? You do know that rouge in Japan is made from a safflower that is very much like those thistles. The flower is fermented and you get a paste of very dark purple red.
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Crud i am going in two different directions. If you want to play GI JOE with those thistles get one of these. Carry the tank in the back of you trail vehicle or a garden cart behind your garden tractor. I modified mine. My older one died so i cut the hose and used two 3/8 barb fittings. Installed airhose connectors on them. Now you can use a 50 foot hose and it is very handy. Just flame the plant like in the movie "Men in Black" You don't need to burn the plant down just flame it up and down. Breaks all of the cells in the leafs. Within an hour you can see everything dropping dead.
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When I bought this farm 28 years ago they used to call it the thistle farm. Once in a while you can find one. Rite now have a group of canadian thistle where my mom planted some seed she bought cheap.
 
Had a pony stallion that would carefully nip off the Canadian thistle blossums with his teeth. He loved them and would really get up a good slobber.
 
they grow all over this county used to be just where some machine had worked the ground, but the last 15 years or so there all over, the town up the road is a high turnover town, people buy and sell houses after a few years, s group of newbies decided they were going to save us from ourselves, and organized, the usual t shirts and floppy hat ladies , it got to be such a pia to the locals, they would march right on private property digging and spraying their home made stuff. anyway we heard when their big rally meeting was, and it seems a couple thistle plants that were about 4 foot tall got put in planters, and fed the miracle grow and cared for, well, they came to their meeting, and would you guys believe, there was 2 potted thistle plants in bloom and a good 6 feet tall, right at their place?
 
Only good reason I have found to have horses, and I (we) have had them for 40 years. They pluck the heads off when they bloom, especially Canadian thistles, but will eat bull thistles too.
 
We sent some pictures to the county weed guy a few years ago. We couldn't get a handle on them in one pasture, the neighbor's crp hillside beside it was purple.

Guy I was working for bought some ground that had out-of-sight-out-of-mind weed control used on it. Mid October that year I went in with roundup, 2,4d, tordon, some powdered stuff he used, and crop oil- my LBOE mix- little bit of everything. Sprayed all I could find. Couldn't hardly find any thistles the next spring.
 

It's a thistle farm my place. Pollinators are attracted to them, butterflies seem to be especially fond.
 

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