When I wrote a newsletter yesterday I referred to the series of blog posts about the pasture that I wrote over the last year. You can find any of these by searching Pasture and Irrigation Renovation (14 posts) and Grazing and Irrigation (7 posts).

Tonight’s post will follow up on this Grazing and Irrigation post (#7) written in June about May grazing. The pasture looks much different now than it did then.

The ryegrass is gone and you see mostly clover.

Next most prominent is birdsfoot trefoil, and more recently the chicory has taken a foothold. Those are the three broadleaf plants that were in our seed mixture. All of the paddocks in the south pasture look like this now. Back in the spring we started topping the ryegrass with the mower before grazing and mowed again after grazing. This prevented the ryegrass from being flattened over the clover and becoming a mulch layer.

The smaller field on the north is different. We didn’t graze early enough and this is where the annual ryegrass had such a head start on the clover and overwhelmed it in places. I took this photo while irrigating two weeks ago. While the pasture was flooded, some of the ryegrass “mulch” floated and I was able to rake a lot of it into piles thinking that I’d be able to move it out with the tractor.

A few days later I realized that I didn’t want to wait until the field dried out enough to use the tractor. I was ready to graze again but the lane was still too muddy. I realized that I could use all that straw to cover up the mud. So I used the wheelbarrow.

I used at least a dozen big loads of ryegrass straw to fill in the lane.

This is Sparky in that north field. Hopefully over the course of winter these bare spots will fill in now the they aren’t covered with mulch.