What's in a name? Slender foxtail.

I've been out doing the second visit to 'my' Breeding Bird Survey square.  The virtuous feeling I have when I get back home at 07:30 having collected bird data for the BTO and the RSPB is about as virtuous as I ever feel!

I noticed that there was quite a lot of slender foxtail in the fields.  This is a native annual grass found throughout the UK but commonest on heavy soils in the south and east of England and is also known as hungerweed and rat-tail grass.   OK, I'll come clean, it's known by farmers as black grass which is partly because its seed heads look black at some times of year but also because it is one of the worst weeds of cereal crops.  You don't call your worst enemy slender foxtail, you call it something nasty like black grass.

If you are in the southeast of England and stop by a field of wheat, crouch down and look across the top of the wheat stems, and you will probably see patches of a longer grass (because, after all, wheat is a grass) sticking up above the crop - this is likely to be black grass.  Look in the hedgerows and the verges and you'll see it too but probably not in great abundance.

Wheat yields drive the profit for much arable farming in the UK - prices for wheat have varied from about £55/ton to £160/ton over the last few years.  And yields can vary from say 8 tons/hectare to about 12 tons/hectare.  Ideally, many farmers would grow wheat in all their fields every year but if you do then weeds such as black grass build up and cause bigger and bigger losses of yield.  So every other year, or maybe one year in three, each field grows a different crop, usually a broad-leaved crop such as oilseed rape or beans (rahter than another cereal such as barley) .  In these non-cereal crops it is easier to use herbicides that will clobber the grasses such as black grass (or slender foxtail - such a nice name!).

Of course black grass is only a weed because it is inconvenient to us and because it is well suited by the way that we try to grow wheat.  Black grass flowers from May to the autumn and sheds most of its seeds before harvest in July or August.  The seeds remain dormant until the autumn which means that they start to grow over the winter when the fields of winter wheat are bare.  To get rid of the black grass large amounts of herbicide are used but now the black grass is developing resistance to them and so it is a war between the imagination of the chemical herbicide makers and the grass.

If you walk down a green lane between arable fields, as I did this morning, you'll see many species of grass and it would be impossible to tell which might be the biggest problem for the farmer in the nearby fields.  If you knew about the grasses' biology and the timing of agricultural activity you might be better placed to identify the potential weeds.  But really, you'd have to know which would stand up to the chemical barrage of herbicides before you could predict that it would be black grass heads that you see waving above the wheat crop.

The slender foxtail causes us a lot of problems - but you have to admire its resilience, just a bit.