ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A bubbly young women from the heart of our town’s cosmopolitan French Quarter had to sit for 40 minutes over the weekend and listen to what Paterson’s Curse is and why it’s bad.
Dana O’Driscoll, travelling in a late model Subaru Outback, pointed out at the old Dearden Dairy on the Jundah Road on Sunday afternoon and remarked to her country friend driving that she’d just spotted a field of “pretty flowers”.
Craning her neck to the side as she white-knuckled the steering wheel, her friend Sam Pearson smiled wryly and took a deep breathe.
“That’s Paterson’s Curse. It’s actually a weed,” said Sam, staring out at the white lines zipping under the Ota-shi Omnibus.
“A really bad one, too.”
The smile melted on Dana’s face as Sam continued.
“What you see there is just bad land management. The person who owns that land should really be on top of that. Like, you see how it just stops at the fence line there? That shows the bloke on the other side knows what he’s doing, you know? He’s on top of his weed management and you can see how much the natural pasture has come back after all the rain we’ve had. You see, when you have an out-of-control weed infestation like that it works in competition for the natural pasture. Dana, I know you mean well but the old PC is highly competitive in these natural pastures. It replaces good plants without contributing to forage value. Paterson’s curse contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which can proper fuck your livestock, particularly horses. But sheep can graze it for a time. But not too long. It becomes quite harmful, even to sheep, because the alkaloids eventually cause liver damage, especially if stock consume large amounts of this weed in winter and spring and then graze on common heliotrope over summer.”
Dana nodded.
“But so many cockies see the purple flower and think, ‘Fuck me, I’ve got to get on this before it gets out of hand,’ and they head into CRT and get enough RoundUp to roll the Amazon. They should be looking for evidence of insect damage first, because you’ve got these weevils, which are small insects that are kind of like plant fleas, that eat the Paterson’s Curse and do to it what it does to Pharlap’s liver. That’s called a biocontrol agent. Pretty interesting stuff if you ask me.”
The short explanation, Dana says, went on for nearly 40 minutes until Sam suggested they listen to a podcast on regenerative agriculture and the need to make food production carbon neutral moving forward.
More to come.
