The pictures in this post are about a week old and are already out of date.  This week we have highs in the 70’s and good chances for rain each evening.  You can almost watch the grass grow right now.

I am grazing my cows on remaining stockpile.  Mostly though, I’m packing them into a small area and feeding them hay.  I’m pushing carbon into the soil mostly on countour to the hill slope.  Will it work?  Well…it should.  We’ll see.  Maybe you’ll see the difference in the pasture over the next few years.

Normally I start taking pictures as I leave the house.  I’ll start todays’ walk by the horse barn instead.  Last month I took a picture of a down locust tree in a sea of fescue nubbins.  We burned the tree then overseeded with clover, orchardgrass, timothy and two kinds of rye grass and here’s what it looks like now (though the camera is pointed more to the right).

The horses ate it down to the nubbins but it’s coming back well and it’s coming back with additional diversity.  The real miracle here was that the horses showed me around 20 or so honey locust saplings.  BTW, the picture above is almost the same shot as the one in this picture.  I’ve cut a lot of hedge in the last year.  There is a lot more to cut…and this is just one of my hedge forests.  Many of the stumps are sprouting so I’ll have an ongoing supply of thorns and firewood in 5-10 years.  Also, a pair of rabbits are living in the brush pile we built last year, though I only see them when I am out walking at night.

The plan is to allow this to sit idle until July or so.  Once the drought hits I’ll have a stockpile of grass for the cows to tromp and eat through.  There are about 2 acres here.  With luck, that will be just the bridge I need to allow my main pastures to recover fully.  Then we’ll graze this again over the winter.  Next year we’ll allow a different patch of land to go.  This builds up carbon over time, allows ground-nesting birds to have a home and helps us keep our cows fat.

The top of the hill was also grazed by the horses but not as intensively.  It’s still a thick mass of fescue but was well pounded by running, playing horses and heavily manured.  Good enough.

But there are still clumps of moss growing on the North face of the hill.  Where there is moss there is not grass.  Where there are hooves there is no moss.  I need more hooves…more pressure…to allow the grass to compete.

On the topic of hedge, below the cemetery I cut out a single hedge tree that fell over and continued growing.  One tree, laying on its side, killing grass over a 40′ circle.  This tree was the source of the pile of wood featured in a recent Facebook post.  There is still an equal amount of wood waiting for me to cut now.  I have opened up more area for grazing and rid myself of a sick tree but cost myself small game habitat.  That’s why I build brush piles.  Quail and rabbits need shelter.  If I won’t allow dead and dying trees to create that shelter naturally I have to do it myself.  I also can’t continue cutting out undesirable trees without replacing them with something else or planning for their regrowth .  More on that in a future post.

The cows grazed their way through the bottom in January.  There wasn’t much out there for them to eat as it was a serious weed patch, as was most of the pasture before we began.  We spent an afternoon pulling sprouts out with a tractor last winter.  This year it was just graze and let it grow.  It’s growing.  But I’ll need some pressure to keep the weeds at bay and give the grasses a competitive advantage.  To be honest, I’m a little worried.  Goldenrod, ragweed and burrdock are clearly dominant down here.  I don’t want it to look like this:

There’s a little wedge of pasture West of our house by the road.  When you come to our farm, this is what you see.  Looks great, doesn’t it?  I need to get a tractor in there to pull out the snags and rip out the sprouts but the whole thing is a thorny mess.  Just like the bottom used to be.  It’s an awful lot like work.  I try to let the cows do as much of it as I can.

The pigs are in their final pasture position before shipping on Tuesday.  You can see the kind of disturbance they create.  That’s what we hire them to do.  Right now I’m not grinding their feed.  Among other things, they get cracked corn, roasted soybeans and whole oats.  The oats are still whole when they come back out.  In a few weeks I’ll have a rich, strong stand of oats on my slope for the cows to graze through…thanks to the pigs plowing, manuring and seeding.

The layer flock is in the same fence with the broilers on the alfalfa field.  You can see an outline in the picture above showing where the chicken tractor had been moments before.  The layers rush in to scratch through the manure and to gobble up any feed the broilers wasted.  Both this and the neighbor’s alfalfa fields look purple right now from all the henbit blooms (and buzzing with bees).  The hens bit the henbit here.  None of it is left within the fenced area.  The alfalfa is nibbled back but recovers quickly.  Doing this may be risky in terms of the lifetime of the alfalfa stand but we not only get 4 cuttings of alfalfa here, we also get 500 chickens per acre and …I don’t even know how many dozen eggs, not to mention the fertility the birds put back into the soil.  Am I hurting my alfalfa stand?  I really don’t think so.

Back to the cows.  Molly is chewing here cud in the sunlight.  Life is good.  You can see the distant hillside still recovering from the pigs who were there until October or November.  I see this less as a problem and more as a matter of time.  There is manure, carbon, seeds and living plant roots out there.  With help from cow hooves I’m sure the scars will heal quickly.  I present the grass in the foreground as evidence.  Those same pigs were there in August.  The cows aren’t scheduled to return to the cemetery hill until late May or even June.

Mostly fescue but it’s growing.  There is a fair amount of clover mixed in as well.  We’ll get there.

These pictures were taken on March 11th though I was delayed in posting them.  These pictures were taken early in the evening the day after a heavy rain storm.

A sea of oxidizing fescue.  I mowed a small portion of this hill in December for sledding.  I wish I hadn’t.  The cows grazed the hill to the left in November and again in February.  They won’t see it again till May.

There are a few clumps of henbit emerging on the hillside.  The grasses the cows prefer are starting to sprout away from the clumps of fescue.  Not much else happening.

This is the primary sledding hill by the cemetery.  The grass was pretty thin when we left the drought last Fall.  Pigweed stood in tall masses at the top of the hill, honey locust sprouts dotted the slope.  It was pretty nasty.  Hopefully we’ll use the cows correctly to push succession forward.

8-10″ tall fescue.  The cows aren’t interested.

I invited dad’s horses to graze about 1/4th of an acre down to the nubbins.  This area is always a thick carpet of fescue.  The horses carpeted it with manure and pounded it with hooves.  It was awesome!  When they got to the bottom I could see a the bones of a honey locust I cut down a few years ago.  The tree (and most of its thorns) are now burned up and I have seeded the area with clovers and a variety of grasses.  Wait till you see the recovery picture!

Nearer to the house the pigs have really made a mess of the pasture.  3 pigs above 250 pounds have to be moved frequently.  I want disturbance not destruction.  Where they dig I kick the clods back into place and overseed with grasses and clovers.  Please notice the pigs are clean and dry.  Trust me when I say they are happy.  They have room to run, work to do, fresh air to breathe, they can see the sun where most pigs are bored, confined, smelly and indoors.  The pasture will heal quickly.  The pork will be delicious.

The alfalfa was just starting to emerge.  I do some crazy stuff…some of it out of ignorance, some of it because I just don’t have the time to get everything done.  I continued to move my layer flock across the dormant alfalfa field all winter.  If that damaged the alfalfa I can’t see it.  The emerging plant population does not appear to be diminished.  That said, I don’t care for the empty spaces between the alfalfa plants.  Nature will fill those spaces, probably with fescue.  I think I should beat her to the punch.

I’ll post my April stroll soon and will try to show the recovery that follows the pigs.