Starve acre

Starveacre is most injured when spraying is not done until the weed has just begun to flower, when the plants are usually killed outright.

Corn Buttercup (or Starveacre), Hoary Pepperwort (Chalk Weed or Thanet Weed) and Spotted Medick afford notable instances of this.

But our modern weed-killers are master of the charlock, the poppy and the starveacre.

Broken only by brief, grudging truces and attended since the middle of the century by periodic visitations of plague and famine, the long war had almost completely stripped their rocky, starveacre land of what little wealth it possessed.

The agricultural subsidies may have been in decline, but even the most starveacre farm is likely to include a trickling bog and the hills were suddenly alive with the sound of water running into plastic bottles.

“Of course, Tess! Is this Flintcombe Ash then? It doesn't look like a 'starveacre' place, as Hardy puts it.”