Whew ... first of all let me say that it's been awhile since I have taken/had the time to sit down and write ... even for a few minutes. A couple of weeks ago I started getting busy and then last week up until yesterday I was doing my civic duty ... jury duty ... and it was very time consuming because on top of jury duty I was also continuing to work at the town job to help keep the finances from taking a hit. Thankfully everything finished up yesterday and I'm hoping I can somewhat return to a normal schedule.
I just wanted to take a moment though and give an update on my pasture because a question about it popped up in the comments awhile back. First of all let me share the background ... This will be summer number three of grazing the pasture and hopefully the first with a whole seasons worth of multiple moves per day. The first season was what I would call "unmanaged grazing". At that time I had no perimeter fences so I just moved the cows around in large areas as there was need and as I could put up fence. The second year I did finally get the fence up and I rotated daily (for the most part), but not as many moves per day as I would like. Now I'm into year three and hopefully I'll be apply some changes based on what I've learned ... hopefully ...
The thing is though ... generally speaking the pasture has not improved as much as I would have hoped. As I've mentioned before this land spent at least 14 years in the Conservation Reserve Program and had a pretty weak stand of native grasses along with plenty of brush and bare spots. The warm season grasses that were growing are tough to graze early in the season so I haven't been able to get my cattle on grass as soon as I would like (such as this year ... they still are eating hay). Last year I no-till drilled seed on about 10 acres, but the spring was so wet that I could never get out and mow down the weeds that were taking over my new seeding. The result is that my alice white clover seems to have taken hold fairly well, but the grasses really did nothing!
So, that is where I stand now. Things are not at all where I had expected or hoped they would be, but I can see small changes here and there and I do have hopes for the future. One thing that I will continue thinking about though is some seeding in hopes of jump starting things a little. I was just disappointed with my last seeding try ...
Have you thought of just grazing those areas instead of reseeding?
ReplyDeleteI've got an area that caught fire a couple of summers ago that I initially kept the cattle off of trying to get the grass to come back faster. The weeds came back thick (which is their job - stopping erosion). The grass didn't overtake the weeds until I started grazing it again.
Grazing animals need grass and grass needs grazing animals. The grass would have came back sooner if I hadn't waited so long to start grazing it again. Of course, this is a native prairie grass pasture, so it is adapted to fire and grazing, but the same sort of thinking should apply to any type of pasture (and, if it doesn't respond this way, is it a good choice for grazing?).
On the general idea of reseeding, there might be enough seed either laying dormant in your soils or left from when you drilled it last time to regrow your pasture.