Monday, May 20, 2013

Cheat grass and rain

I've been bad, bad, bad about staying up to date around here!  It's been two weeks since I posted - the good news is, there's not much in the way of news.

Only one ride - my mom and I saddled up Rufus and Sunny and toured the pasture for a while, swapped horses and did it again.  Just a nice quiet evening ride, and we had them unsaddled, brushed and the tack away just in time for an evening shower.

The orchard, which looked so gorgeous and green, unfortunately turned out to be coming up more in cheat grass and not so much the nice cool weather pasture mix we planted. :( I let the horses enjoy it while it was still green enough that they could eat it, but it was starting to get barb-y so I spent a long, slow couple of hours yesterday mowing a good chunk of it.  Stopped for supper and ended up not finishing due to a nasty pop-up storm that spawned a tornado down south of here.  Here it was high wind and about an inch of rain in an hour, leaving everything much too wet to finish the mowing.

When I can get the rest mowed (more rain today) I'll drag it and see if I can reseed it... Otherwise I'm going to spend the rest of the summer mowing it off.  Darn cheat!  Sure was pretty coming up, though.

Other than that, there was an encounter with a snake, a raccoon looking in the bedroom window, riding time with my niece before she and her mom headed home, and a failed-to-show by the farrier... stories for later.  Now I need to go catch up on all my blog reading, which I've also been neglecting.  TTFN, but more soon, promise!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I strongly suggest that you forget about mowing and rent yourself a pull behind big sprayer and spray that cheat grass to keep it from spreading. I don't really have it in my pasture but pretty much every one I know in WY does, and it seems like spraying is the best way to go.

SunnySD said...

Hey Cindy! Lucky you :) I think you're very likely right about the spraying. T's mom has a big mount-on sprayer I can use and very likely will, but I want to get it knocked down at least this time before it goes to seed and spreads. Unfortunately, there's a lot of it in the neighbors' cow pastures, so it's probably going to be a never-ending battle.

Kellie said...

Rotten cheat grass. hope you can get rid of it.

You guys get any of those huge/terrible storms yesterday? Talk about scary and just horrible.

Glad all is well in your world - the raccoon peaking in the window sure would have freaked me out :)