David,  Pasture,  Soil

The good, the bad and…

…alright, the ugly. We’ve certainly answered the question:  can you overseed fescue.

Thistlehill Farm Clover
Photo by Curt Humphreys

Grandson Church did just that last January, using a small spreader between light late-season snowfalls. As you can see there was considerable success. You’ll also note some wayward red clover…perhaps in the bulk seed bag but also possibly from earlier years.

This much clover will provide all the nitrogen our pastures could possibly need.

Now for the bad…a confession: this will certainly serve our goal, which was to provide warm season grazing; an antidote to the endophyte fescue. But as you can tell by the seed heads, we’ve let the orchard grass get ahead of us

The best solution now would probably be to run a mower over it lightly. But the cows are strip grazing and getting close.

And that’s the one drawback to strip grazing…the paddocks are very narrow and almost impossible to navigate a tractor and 15’ batwing. Have you ever had to cut off 600 feet of polywire from a batwing blade?

David

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