Clean as a whistle, sharp as a thistle

After last week’s “hateful docks” (that’s what Shakespeare calls them anyway: Henry V, 

V ii 52), today it was “rough thistles”.  This from the session leader:

Well, we all got pretty wet.  Mainly from the grass.  It was the thistles, though, which had a rough morning.

We knew it was going to be a dull damp day, so came dressed for the rain:

All bar one, that is.  There was just one participant who couldn’t care less about the weather:

The task was thistle-pulling in a meadow down by the old ferry crossing.  That is one huge meadow, but we were promised that most of the thistles had already been dealt with.

Thistles.  The name alone bring back memories of some years ago, of monstrous thickets of thistles at Castle Meadows that refused to be dug out even with the lazy dogs.  [Or especially with the lazy-dog tools?  Some weeds have to be tackled with a fork, but in some places that is not an option: if soil is fragile, or there are other conservation concerns. – Ed.]   The ones in this meadow were obviously much better bred, or a different species:

The rain and the very long grass had obviously helped.  The thistles did not put up too much of a fight, but enough to get our muscles working.  So we each took up a bucket and proceeded to fill it. 

This was the standard method: crush them down into the bucket as much as possible.

The more elegant/creative members preferred a flower arrangement in the bucket:

Others just carried a huge armful at a time:

Whichever way, all the thistles were carried over and piled in the hedge.  We had thought initially that some were destined to be fed to the goats that are now living in the old barn.  (In fact we thought it would have been much easier to have let the goats loose in the field to save our efforts.)

At the end we were all pretty wet even into wellington boots, as much from the very long grass as from the intermittent drizzle.  (When one Green-Gymmer got home, he took off his boots and poured the water out of them.)

We didn’t quite finish, as you can just make out:

[And are those “hateful docks” I see in the foreground? – Ed.]