Last year my little pasture was full of beautiful yellow buttercups.
No one has really used this pasture in the summertime for a few years, and the buttercups took over. Mom and Brita have been talking about what to do about this, since I have been trying to eat every little bit of green I can find. They said that buttercups will make me sick. and the more I eat, the sicker I'll get. So, today Mom was standing above my pasture with the crossthestreet neighbor talking about tilling them under. All of a sudden, on the horizon, Mom spotted the downtheroad neighbor with a tractor and plows, and he was headed past our little farm. I don't know what it is about a man on a tractor that gets these gals all excited, but add an implement and they just go wild. Next thing I knew, that big tractor was in my pasture just ruining the grass. And apparently, he will be back next week with more implements. I sure hope he plans to put things back the way it was.
So anyway, we went for a nice little ride. But while we were out, the winds changed, and the temperature dropped 20 degrees. I'm not kidding. It was like opening the refrigerator door. The wind was so high that we couldn't hear important stuff like traffic coming, so we'd gone for a little mosey around the fields, visited the tame red cows, had a nice little canter, and were headed up the woods trail when that blast of cold air hit us. We turned and hightailed it back to the barn before we got caught in the rain. Brita said when she got to the barn today it was 72 degrees and when she left, it was 50 degrees. Now it's pouring rain out, everyone is inside and we're munching our hay. April showers bring May flowers... but they won't bring buttercups.
2 comments:
Oh, those buttercups are a pain!! They love growing in moist places and spread like wildfire- their roots are awful to get up. My Boy won't eat them (they grow on the fringes of his pasture) he'll skip right over and around them. Most horses won't eat them, they aren't very palatable. Someone once left a comment on my blog about an organic spray you could make, that was non-toxic, that would kill them. I think it had cider vinegar and something else in it. I bet you could find such a formula if you googled it. But plowing them down works, too! ;)
Usually they eat around them, but this pasture hasn't had anything done with it ever. So, Farmer Ben will be back next week with discs, then we will have it limed, and planted with Timothy and Orchard Grass which will be safe for the IR horses. In the mean time, Mom will be searching for arrowheads and other treasures. We also had a back furrow cut in addition to the existing drainage, and within half an hour we had water running from the boggy spot so that is an added bonus.
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