The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Techniques and skills => Topic started by: Ted Sutton on April 17, 2014, 06:49:57 am
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Hi
Got a 3 acre paddock been unused for about 10 years, just been left. Has been cropped and also baled for hay in the past. Want to bring it back to life, partly for horses and other livestock and partly for planting. Its full of lumps of dead grass and thistles. Has remains of an old hedge around the edge, with a large plantation of sycamore seedlings about 1" in diameter along one edge.
Want to get as much as possible into use as quickly as possible for horse grazing this summer and have a longer term strategy to deal with the rest, so planned to top and chain harrow the best bit in the centre and put some electric fence up and then deal with the rest.
I would like to work towards a situation with the hedge repaired and with it all fenced properly. What is the best way forward with it please?
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Are you planning to graze horses on it permanently? .... they aren't the best paddock regenerators!
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Not necessarily on all of it but certainly will be on some of it in the long term. Horse has got to live somewhere. Open to all ideas!
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On the limited information available; top it and hard harrow to remove thatch. As it wouldn't be wise to put the horses on immediately following harrowing, use the opportunity to spot treat any undesirables such as the the thistle, ragwort, etc.
Dependant on the number of horses and how urgent your need is to get the horses onto the land, you may wish to strip graze especially at this time of the year, and if necessary supplement with hay.
Secure the boundary with a view to incorporating existing 'wild' growth into a hedgerow during the autumn/winter months.
Word of warning though! It sounds like you have a lot of mature sycamores if there is evidence of seedlings taking hold? While the trees are OK, where horses are concerned there is a link between atypical myopathy in horses consuming sycamore seeds.
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Are you planning to graze horses on it permanently? .... they aren't the best paddock regenerators!
I disagree. If you graze hard, rotate and clean the paddock daily, horses make a pretty good job of tidying up a paddock. We had a pretty untidy one a couple of years ago; strip grazed it with the ponies, cleaning the paddock daily until they were almost done, then left the dung down; springtine harrowed and it looks really good now.
The ponies are the best grazers of soft rush by far. The problem with horses IMHO is that the grazing often isn't managed - it's not the horses per se.
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+1 from me Rosemary. :thumbsup:
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Can the saplings be laid into a hedge?
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Well the Orchard here had had ponies in it then it sat for 5 years, pigs ploughed it for a few months then it sat again for 10 years until I took it on. I went out with the tractor and topper, topped the bad sections (slowly... it was as tall as me in places!) and made hay on the rest. we repeated this for 2 years/3 cuts of hay then turned my ewes out there over summer. I also underwent a rigorous rolling and harrowing regime inc rolling it several times a year! it is now unrecognizable! it's like a lawn....
Good luck and be careful with horses, we have 11 and had only horses for 15 years and have been suffering massively from buttercup plagues! My sheep and a friend's long horn cattle have added diversity to the land and it has since improved hugely. this sept. i intend to resurrect the muck spreader...
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Thanks everyone. Keep the ideas coming please.
Possibly could incorporate selected saplings into the hedge but certainly not all. They are taking about an 8ft swath of usable land. And if the seeds are poisonous may be not a good plan here?
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Agree with Rosemary.
My horses have made an excellent job of ressurecting an old pasture that the owner was all for ploughing up and reseeding. Apart from a new problem with moss, which may be related to the mild, wet winter it is good grazing now. Horses don't, as a rule, eat buttercups though, so they can be a problem, but adding sheep and geese helps clear them up and any sour patches horses leave.
I'd say top, harrow and graze hard, poo pick often and reseed any bald patches as necessary. Get a ph/mineral test done by an agricultural consultant and add fert or lime as indicated. And get rid of as much sycamore as possible or at the very least don't graze horses near them in autumn to avoid the risk of grass sickness!
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Last year it was cut and baled free of charge for a rough hay crop which was given to the bloke who cut it. Didnt have horse then (who probably wont live here full time till until next summer and has enough free hay where he is to get through next winter)
Got about 120 bales of very average stuff off it last year. For various reasons havnt got time (or all the equipment) to do it myself but that would be the future plan. Wandering whether to have it cut and baled again but keep (or sell) the hay this time as the grass, whilst far from a lush hay crop, looks a bit better now, which would involve spending money on a load of not the best hay or just top the whole lot off and start the improvement regime asap?
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we bought our place and it hadnt been grazed for many years, and we used sheep and ponies to sort the land,
though cattle do very well for clearing away scrub and long grass. our land has seen a big improvement since our cattle came.
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Cut it early for hay - which will probably be fine for sheep and goats, then get some sheep on it. It will likely be much better than last years. We did this with an overgrown piece of land (not touched for 10 years) and the sheep ate the hay most of the winter.
Get rid of as much sycamore as possible, rotten stuff. You could put the fencing well inside the hedge - you will lose a bit of grazing but gain a shelter belt which is useful for shade and winter shelter, and makes a great wildlife corridor :thumbsup: (you might even get a grant for it, check out ELS options too).
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The only animal that will deal thoroughly with thistle is Homo sapiens. I've been manually clearing a similar size field to yours of creeping thistle and have probably pulled in excess of seven or eight thousand individual plants so far! What I've noticed is that where I pulled last year only modest numbers have reappeared this year. And those are easy to deal with as a mopping up exercise. Pulling works, unlike herbicide which can trigger the reappearance of countless numbers of tiny thistles in the sward as a response. Moreover herbicide will kill your wildflowers of which there may possibly be more species in your field than you realise. From what you say, your field appears to have once been managed as a hay meadow. Haymaking encourages species diversity particularly when carries out consistently over time.
To keep morale up, I divide the field into ten or fifteen metre strips using road pins (those ubiquitous metal rods with a crook on the end) so I focus on one section of infestation at a time. I found the process of removing thistle manually really satisfying, particularly once you can finally step back and look at pasture which has become transformed through your own painstaking work. If you do decide on manual pulling, take care to protect your thumbs and fingers.Thistles can penetrate through gloves and repeated prickles left in your fingers is painful. A tip; apply surgical tape to the end of your thumb and first two fingers - Elastoplast or similar - before putting on gloves. Whatever gets through the glove won't then reach your skin.
If you are interested in wildflowers, there is a ton of information and advice online. Google 'restoring hay meadows' or similar. The key is setting up the right grazing or mowing regime and allowing sections of the field to remain uncut or ungrazed over summer to allow the herb plants to flower and seed. It is entirely possible to keep a horse while also managing your field for conservation interest.