First of all, apologies to our friends to the East, who have this:
Here in the Pacific Northwest, things look a little different. About this time of year, Mother Nature says, Ding! Your grass is ready to eat!
Our hillside is demanding to be grazed. After last summer’s difficult drought, this spring we are blessed with early, luxuriant, boot-high, green, green grass. I wanted to move the ewes over it once before lambing starts. It’ll be many weeks before I can practicably graze them there again. It’s a tricky area to fence with portable hotwire, and moving the sheep to and from is some work. Not easy to do with defensive new mommas and a bazillion lambs that don’t yet know about herd dogs. That area is a pain to mow, so mowing it is the job of the sheep.
Thus, the major preggo ewes (accompanied by the gents) are doing the hillside now, with 1.5 weeks to go until lambs begin to arrive. Some of the bigger ladies are moving a little slow over the slope, taking it easy. Uff Da! But they are so thrilled to have green grass, it’s worth the effort. I’m also glad for them to get some exercise leading up to lambing, as I personally believe it contributes to easier births.
They are getting a full helping of grain, and still a half portion of hay, which they seem to have the good judgment to eat. Spring grass can sometimes be “washy,” or full of a lot of water. Because their stomachs are squished by big fetuses, I want to make sure they are taking in enough calories.
They should finish the area just in time to wind up back in the reed canarygrass field when the first lambs are due. Lambing will commence there, rotate through, and finish up just as they are moving to the far field. Perfect timing this year, that grass will be a major shag ready to feed those nursing ladies some primo greens!
March 20, 2013 at 4:36 am
Total grass envy here! My scraggy west facing pasture (on a hillside canted to the north, to boot), with too many trees (in and around – one of my projects this year is to cull some of the big leaf maples, maybe a cottonwood or ten) is nothing like your gorgeous green. I have been letting the flock out of the winter pen in the evenings and weekend afternoons to nibble on the early shoots (the reed canarygrass takes over as quick as Jack’s beanstalk in the spring) and they are loving it and enjoy pruning the tender buds of understory shrubs in the woods too.
I’m still working on rehabilitating things, my third year here. We’re ahead of the blackberries as of last year (lots of work by the sheep and hand pruning by me) and the buttercup is just a ghost of its former colonies. I’m hoping with the tree culling and a lot of lime I can maybe tip the scales on the moss coverage, and with some overseeding again, maybe even make some measurable headway to a real pasture. Before I moved here it had been at least a year or two since horses were on the property, so there’s been a lot of browse for the flock, which the Shetlands love, but the grass production hasn’t been stellar. Yet.
March 20, 2013 at 4:59 am
wowee..we had more snow last week. just got the field harrowed and now we wait. I just cannot believe how lush everything where you are is….where are you anyways..i want to move there
March 20, 2013 at 5:02 pm
Wow! We are still having snow in Boston, so I look at your long grass with envy!
March 21, 2013 at 5:24 am
mcfwriter- keep at it, it’s amazing how you can shift a landscape if you keep working on it. This hillside of ours used to be total blackberries, 10 feet tall! We weren’t really sure we’d ever get it under control, but if you just keep chipping away at it, it will morph. We used to have a lot of buttercup in our pastures too, and one field of solid RCG. We also used to get our tractor stuck all the time in the mud! But all that is changing, now it drains well and is drive-able year round, the buttercup is mostly replaced, and even the RCG is getting a mix of species, which I didn’t even think was possible. It’s incredible what intensive rotational grazing will do!
March 21, 2013 at 5:26 am
Carol, we are in Western Washington state. We have our regional downsides- lots o’ rain, short winter days, meager summertime weather, and the threat of earthquakes. But the growing is awfully good!
March 21, 2013 at 5:27 am
Virginia, indeed, we are usually lucky to have a long grazing season here. In good years, I can graze past Thanksgiving, and start up again in early March. We don’t get much snow, our winters are pretty temperate. Even when I lived in town, I used to curse having to mow the lawn all winter, because it would still be growing in December! 🙂
March 23, 2013 at 7:49 am
That grass in the pictures is reed canary grass. I think that the vast majority of the grass in the snohomish valley is reed canary unless you take great pains to eradicate it and plant something else, but since it’s so tough and tolerant of floods, why?
March 23, 2013 at 5:52 pm
Bruce, actually this hillside is planted with a pasture mix and there is very little RCG in it. This area was solid blackberries when we moved here, so this is all our planting, plus whatever volunteer grasses we have here. It is not in the flood plain.
We have two fields down lower, in the flood plain. One was intensively managed for dairy cattle fodder, and also has a low percentage of RCG. The other was left fallow for a long time and was almost 100% RCG when we started (plus a few other annoying things, like thistle and buttercup). I also used to think the RCG could never be replaced.
Interestingly, our RCG field is shifting now that it’s being intensively grazed and mowed, and other grass species are filling in there. The thistle and buttercup are almost gone. I think RCG is able to out-compete other species when left fallow, but with constant mowing or grazing, it levels the playing field (no pun intended) and other species do just as well.
It is a good grass, but only when it’s in the shorter growing stages. It’s tricky to keep it there since it grows so quickly, so we end up having to mow it to keep it palatable. So for our uses, I’m glad to see it getting some competition from other species.