We have spent August pulling Common Ragwort (Senecio jacobaea). We have a lot of this and we will never remove all of it, not that we want to, as it is used as the food plant of the Cinnabar Moth (Tyria jacobaeae). It is also a useful late-season nectar source, for all kinds of bees, butterflies, moths, hoverflies, etc. We just want to limit the amount of seed it spreads, every little helps! It is a biennial, which means we must do this next year to be effective!

In August we spent over 24 hours of effort removing this plant, this is one of our “sacrifice areas” where we dump arrisings from work parties. While the photo below looks spectacular, the bulk of the pile was left over from a couple of corporate work parties we had last season removing Blackthorn or Sloe (Prunus spinosa)

One irritation is that just because you pull the plant in flower, does not stop it from producing seed. The left-hand side of the pile was pulled at the beginning of August, and that did not stop it from producing seed!