Fall Grazing

Hendrix and his group of ewes have been in the back pasture since breeding season started and they have been at the north end of that pasture for a couple of weeks. Since hardly anything is growing (start the rain dance please) I figured that they couldn't do too much damage leaving them that long. I thought that maybe that could take down the dallisgrass and they actually did a pretty good job of it in most of the pasture. It is still a challenge however along the ditch and the fence-line. (If you search dallis  in the blog search you'll see several posts about my attempts to conquer it.) This is the north end of the property. Notice the blackberries on the north fence. I cut these away in the spring to uncover the electric fence wire on the inside of the field fence. The sheep could help in that job except that this time of year the dallis grass growing in and around the ditch keeps them from going over there. It may seem hard to believe that a grass keeps sheep from something, but this stuff is so coarse and strong it's like hacking your way through a jungle. And it's very sticky now from a fungus that grows on the seed head. Several years ago I found a ewe whose horns were so tangled in it that she was stuck upside down in this ditch. The only reason that I knew she was there was that she was baaing.  The sheep in the photo above are in the ditch because I trampled some of the grass and put alfalfa there.  This photo shows that they are making progress. Now I can actually see a ditch and the sheep can get through it to the side with the blackberries. They are finding the hay in the blackberries and it makes it worth their while to work their way through the grass.

After about a week we have worked our way through the ditch and I'm putting the hay near the fence.     Then I moved beyond the blackberries and had them trample the dallisgrass along the rest of the fenceline.This is the east fence and it looked almost as full of grass before I started this project. It is more overrun with blackberries. The sheep have eaten some of the leaves off. I think I have to get in there with clippers now though. There is an electric fence hiding in there somewhere.

It's a Jungle Out There

Here is a photo I took last September: I was trying to figure out why I had no power on the electric fence and this was one of the areas that I had to check. Even though my charger will carry power through thick vegetation like these blackberries, the branches could be pushing the hot wire into the old fence and causing it to ground out. (Yes, is a strand of electric wire going through that mess.) I figured it was time to deal with it.

This is after I cut away blackberry branches. You can barely see the insulator that holds the electric wire near the bottom of the post. I cut those branches but left them between the ditch and the fence thinking that I would drag them away later to burn them. Yeah, right. (By the way, this was not the problem with the electric fence. It was grounding out elsewhere.)

 So only a few weeks later I knew that I needed to deal with the dallis grass along that same fence-line. This is the same area, but looking from the other direction. There is supposed to be an irrigation ditch in this photo.This is after weed-eating the ditch. You can see the blackberries that were cut a few weeks before that I never got around to moving and burning.

Fast forward to this spring.  This is the same view as the last photo. The blackberries are growing back through the old blackberries branches that were never moved AND through the mounds of dallis grass. This year I have a residential burn permit instead of an ag permit. If I don't want to go get an ag permit then all my burning has to be done before May 1 (or maybe it's the 30th). But in any case, I needed to get busy. I took a rake and the pruning shears and spent a couple of hours at it.  This is what it looks like now with 2 piles ready to burn. Now hopefully the sheep will keep up with the regrowth of sprouts. When it is so thick with brush and coarse grass the sheep don't even try to get through it.  But there is more! This is the other fence-line--one that I did not deal with last year. See the two electric fence strands disappearing into it?Here it is from the other direction. Farm Club, where are you?