Prepping the land

Last week I had a death in the family.  My grandfather passed away at 83 years of age.  He has been fighting Emphazema for some time now, and the way things played out, we knew it was his time to return home to heaven.  RIP Grandpa.  We love you and miss you!!

I've been gone for 5 days to attend the funeral.  It was great to visit with my family and especially to see my grandma.  Since this blog is about my horses, I'm not going to talk much about this.  Let's just say it was a bad reason for a wonderful family visit.

Upon returning, I noticed how horrible my fields are.  The grass is gone, and only weeds remain.  I was only gone 5 days but wow was there a difference.  My tree lines on the fences are completely thinned out cuz the horses have been eating the leaves from the trees.  The first thing I did, was open up a new section of land for the horses to graze on.  It's an additional 2 acres that they have not yet been on.  They happily entered this new field and are quite happy!

My main pastures have this real crappy weed in it.  It's tall and bushy and is probably sucking up all the moisture that my grass needs.  I spent the day yesterday mowing this down.  Since I don't have a tractor with a brush hog, I used my old riding mower.  It worked well, but it sure takes long to mow 8 acres on a riding mower.  This took the whole day.

This is a shot of my weedy field.

The fields look great now.  Nice and short.  And things worked out well because it is raining now.  This is much needed.  Especially for my plan.

So here's what's going to happen next.  We're supposed to have rain all today and into tomorrow.  Then on Saturday, I'm going to use the horses for some farming!!  My friend Pat is going to loan me a horse drawn disc he has.  I'm going to use my girls to disc up all the land.  It's probably going to take a few times till it's done good.  So saturday starting in the afternoon I'm going to start this.  After going over it once, I will then wait for another rain storm, and then do it again after that.  I'm going to continue this till the land is ripped up nice.  Then I'm going to plant grass.  I have 2 main goals.  One, is to get some nice coastal grass growing again.  The second, is to plant some rye grass so I have quick grass next spring.

So keep your eyes on the blog for my saturdays adventures!  This will be my first time using the horses for working the fields.  I'm real excited to try it and see how it turns out.  It is also going to be great work for the horses.  They have no idea the workout that is in store for them!!!  :)