Posts Tagged ‘weed control’
Weed Control
We had two primary goals in mind when we plotted a strategy for what we would focus our efforts on yesterday. The first was something I hoped wouldn’t take a lot of time to accomplish. There were two tipped trees with upper branches hung up in surrounding trees. Using knowledge gained by watching the tree professionals who worked for us last spring bring down similar “widow-makers,” I readied our chainsaw and headed into the woods.
With my mind focused solely on the task at hand, I failed to take any pictures of the leaning trees or the keen aftermath of my success in bringing them down. The big poplar near the road took a lot more time than I anticipated. After five successive cuts ultimately eliminating the lower trunk that had been leaning at a 45° angle, the remaining upper portion of branches stood vertical and was still tangled in the branches of surrounding trees.
I needed to go back to the shop to get our pole chainsaw to finish the job. By the time we finished cutting trees, the day was more than half over.
The second goal was to get the hay field mowed, a job that I knew would take more hours than I really wanted to give to the task.
The growth wasn’t excessively tall but there were plenty of weeds maturing and we didn’t want them going to seed. I finally finished around 7:00 p.m. after almost 5 hours out on the tractor. At one point, feeling like it was taking too long, I tried running in a higher gear to speed up progress. The bouncing and jostling were a bit too much and the high gear made backing up hard to manage. All I could do was plod along at a steady pace in the lower gear and keep making passes until the entire field was finally cut.
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Cyndie took pictures as I headed toward the gate upon finishing. For a relatively small field, it sure is bigger than it seems.
The horses were relegated to the unmowed back pasture for the day. They are doing a fair job of grazing the good grass in that pasture but there are enough unwanted weeds in that field that it will need to be mowed soon as well.
In a day or two, they will be allowed back on the grass in the hay field. Then I will spend the better part of a day mowing the back pasture.
As much as I dread doing the mowing, the fields sure look great with all the weeds knocked down. For now, in our minds, mowing is our preferred method over chemical applications for reducing weeds that are toxic to horses. It may not be as effective, but mowing doesn’t leave a weed killer residue in our soil.
I can live with giving two afternoons of my precious time to bouncing along on the diesel tractor a couple of times a summer.
It’s easier than chainsawing widow-makers!
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Main Weed
It appears that we are in the peak year for the biennial Queen Anne’s Lace that thrives in our hayfield. Last year had me thinking we had almost eradicated it with frequent mowing. I guess that was just the off-year.
It’s an edible wild food belonging to the carrot family and is second only to beets among root vegetables for sugar content. I think I’ve said this before, that maybe we should be harvesting it as a crop to sell.
The plants are interesting to look at, except when you’ve seen too much of them and would rather not have it growing in your fields.
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Messy round bales of old hay can be interesting to look at, too, unless you’d rather they be stored somewhere else to allow the grass underneath to grow for a second cutting this summer. The fields have been rented out, so I guess they can do what they want.
I’ve got a forest of toppling trees to focus on instead this year. The difference is, I don’t drive through the forest every day, so it is a bit more “out of sight, out of mind” than the fields.
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Another Cut
I’ve written about our frustration over waiting for our hay-field to get cut before the weeds had a chance to go to seed. Now that those fields have been cropped clean, my attention turned to knocking down the weeds and troublesome invasive plants growing rampant on the other side of our driveway.
When I finished mowing, I took a picture.
A day later, Cyndie showed me a photo album our friend Melissa shared with pictures from her visit, days earlier. I couldn’t resist grabbing Mel’s gorgeous image from a similar vantage point, taken before I had mowed.
It causes me a little regret, because the visual of the before/after doesn’t necessarily look like an improvement. There are a few butterflies that aren’t very happy with me, as well. I’m hoping they will find their way over to Cyndie’s other gardens where she has offerings that are desirable to both us and them.
As much as we love the natural look of our uncut field on the north side of our driveway, it contains problem plants that we don’t want migrating across to the hay-field we have been working to improve for years.
One future possibility we are considering is doing a prairie restoration. That process starts with a prescribed burn, which makes it a production that we can’t accomplish all on our own and will need a fair amount of planning and follow through to bring to fruition.
It doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but it is involved enough that it won’t just occur on a whim.
Until then, we will continue to periodically cut down the growth as a way of controlling the weeds from completely taking over.
Sorry, butterflies.
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Relative Something 