Revitalizing old neglected pasture

hello everyone today I'm out here in our pasture area so you can see our livestock barn it's right back there and our pasture area kind of goes all the way over somewhere around this telephone pole and it's going to go all the way down to the trees down in here and then it kind of comes back all the way around to the backside of the dam and you can see all the weeds that have grown through this area so there's it's very weedy of a pasture it's not very good condition and specifically over here in this area there's a dip and there's a ditch down in the middle of here and it's been it's been too steep for me to want to ever mow it so it's never actually been mowed since we've owned this property so I want to recede this area with some good with some good pasture grasses and some good legumes but before I can receive this I need to knock down all these weeds and want to see if I can get these all this mowed down and make it nice and neat before I start receding so that's how I'm going to start doing today is I'm going to see if I can get this whole pasture mowed and some of this will be the first time so let's go ahead get started mowing and then we'll come back and see how we're gonna recede this pasture [Music] [Music] so I think it's been about three weeks since we came out here in mode and cleared the pasture back here of all the weeds and you can see how green the pasture is is just super nice and green all the grasses kind of come back the grass is coming up and there's not much weeds that have come back yet so it's looking really good right now now if you do look around like the culvert right there that culvert you see some some kind of darker spots there around that culvert so it had a lot of ragweed in that area and it was so thick and so dense that it actually completely shaded out all the grass that was underneath so there's no grass or vegetation under there and that's the same with the back side of the dam I cleared about 40 feet off of this end of the dam and it had trees and ragweed and you know love that ragweed ends up being you know shoulder height and it was just completely shaded out all the grass and there's no vegetation in a lot of areas on the backside of that dam as well so that's kind of what I'm looking for right now is I'm looking for where the really bad spots are in the pasture and that's a couple of them but they're on hillsides they're not gonna be easy to deal with but on the backside of the dam here there used to be some brush piles they obviously had cleared the dam before we bought this property and they piled two big brush piles back here and when I had two bulldozer here when we were building our house I had that bulldozer come over and push those two brush piles back into the tree line and and they're back in the in the tree that brushes back in the trees now covered with vegetation you can't really even tell where it is hardly but it left a ton of ruts and potholes and everything in the ground there so there's a lot of missing vegetation it likes to sit with water because it's a low spot from where they dug the dirt out so this area I'd like to go ahead and kind of refinish I think we're gonna go ahead and get the disc out and we're going to kind of write on the backside of the dam here where the where the the ruts and the potholes are we're gonna dis set up try to smooth that all back out and get some grass seed planted in this area and then we'll kinda address how we're going to maybe oversee the entire pasture [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so it's been a week now since I dissed this area on the backside of the dam I just set up and receded that I lost some of the film footage somehow I didn't get something copied or something so I lost some of the film of disking that up and kind of working the soil and everything so basically I I planted that in a fescue orchard grass mixture and after I spread the seed on there I took the I took the chain Harrow dragged on the back of the four-wheeler and I just kind of I just kind of went over the surface you know and I just wanted to incorporate that seed just in the very top of the soil just just barely and maybe to help it germinate better and then I I was rushing to get it done that day and we got a half inch of rain that night and then we got two and a half inches of rain yesterday so the ground is now saturated with water everything's all nice and moist so hopefully this will all you know germinate and grow back and we'll have a nice green pasture there so now it's time to go ahead and seed the rest of this pasture so what I want to do is I just want to over seed the rest of this pasture I think it's been about four weeks now since I mowed it and it is nice coming up all nice and green still don't have any weeds right now so it's looking pretty good but I want to go ahead and there's some patchy areas in here that don't have much grass so I want to go ahead and over seat it now I know a lot of people want to make fun of me because I just seated this and I used a little push cedar and that because that's all I had so I've been looking for some kind of spreader and trying to find it use when I've had no luck I am NOT going to push spread this entire pasture so I finally broke down I bought a cedar so we're gonna go over this with since the ground saturated I don't want to use any big equipment everything's nice and soft right now so we're gonna use a four wheeler and I've got a pull behind spreader and we're going to seed this whole pasture area and basically over seat it and then hopefully it'll make it a thicker grass next spring so this is the spreader that I ended up buying this is just an agro fab pull behind spreader this is one of their bigger ones this is like a hundred and seventy-five pounds that this will hold I think it holds 20 gallons and so you got basically a little lever back here you got a little stop on the lever where you want your gate to be open on how fast you drop seed and then you can operate it basically from reaching behind you on the four-wheeler so I think this will work out for my purposes I should be able to use this for seed I should be able to use this for fertilizer in the future so hopefully this isn't a wasted purchase I think I think I'll get some use out of this over the next few years so I'm gonna be over seed in the pasture today with with fescue and orchard grass and this is grass seed that I've had laying around I actually bought this earlier this year I've used it on several little projects and this is just seed that I have left over so I might as well go ahead and use it and put it to good use so I've got just two different types of fescue over here two different types of orchard grass we're gonna try to mix them all up see if we can get these put inside of the the Agri fab spreader here and then we'll take the four-wheeler and just you know go around the whole pasture and hopefully we can go over the whole thing before we run out of grass hopefully maybe I'll start on some of the worse areas that doesn't have as much grass and get them seated make sure those are at least done but hopefully I'll have enough to go over the entire pasture I'm gonna guess you know because these three bags here were 50 pound bags and I think that was a 25 pound bag so I think in between all them bags I got probably close to 70 pounds worth of seed so hopefully that is enough to oversee this little pasture area here so this is only this is probably only going to be an acre or so that we'll be going over today and get that receipted so let's go ahead and load up the spreader [Music] well I got the hopper about as full as I want to get it and I still have orchard grass and 50 left over probably the cheapest thing about this Agri fab spreader we got to be this cover this is like a little plastic cover to keep the grass heat from going away and it just barely fits see if I can stays on and in the spreadsheet [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so I basically filled that spreader up one and a half times full of grass seed and I had enough seed that I was able to over seed this you know this entire pasture area all around here and then even back behind the barn as well and then there was still a little bit left in the spreader so I was able to kind of go back to the areas that had basically very little grass and go back over those and oversee them again get just a little bit of extra seed in those areas after that was all said and done I still have some orchard grass that's left over in the bag so orchard grass can be frost sown you can frost seed that with clover and I mean that's something that I could do in the spring if I I feel like I can frost seed that I can also use it in the pasture so I think it'll be handy just to actually keep a little bit of grass seed here on hand in case I've got some areas that need patched so I'm gonna go ahead and save what's left in the bag of the orchard grass this spreader worked out pretty good but then as I was making one of my rounds I found some parts laying on the ground and basically the little gear box is on the back the little gear that drives it has a little cover on that and that ended up coming off let me show you what I ended up happening so the gear that drives the spreader is inside of this cover and I ended up hitting a tractor rut and it ended up must have hit the ground and this whole cover is actually two halves and that that that came off of there and you can see there's a clip on this side and there's a clip here and there should be a clip on that side so I ended up losing one of the clips it's basically a clamshell it's got a front half and a back half and it just fits over the axles and and it has these little clips so now I lost one of the clips on the maiden voyage with the spreader so I think there's enough real estate right there I could get a small zip tie on there and and be able to at least get a zip tie on there to help hold it on but that's a little bit disappointing first time out ended up that cover came off and lost one of the clips but it still works fine I think that's just to help protect the gear that's inside of there and keep well guys it's taken me like several weeks to make this video this pasture area back here it's probably been four or five weeks working on it hopefully all this work will pay off so you know knocking the weeds down and mowing it mowing it for the first time since we've owned it now that I've mowed these hills back here I think I'll feel a little more comfortable and be able to do that again so I may have to mow this next year just to kind of knock the weeds down again but hopefully all the over seating all that grass seed hopefully a good portion of that will germinate and we'll have some good healthy grass out here some new grass out here and then the areas where we've just completely dissed up and receded hopefully that over there will come back well and hopefully we'll have a nice healthy pasture for livestock now that I've got this done the next thing we're going to be doing is we're gonna be trying to fence this in so that's probably gonna be more of a winter project but we're gonna be setting fence posts and just kind of get in this whole area back here fenced in so hopefully we can finally get some more more and bigger livestock next year so anyway that's it guys thanks for watching see you guys in the next video [Music] [Music]

Channel: Country View Acres

Views: 111,303

Rating: 4.9184399 out of 5

Keywords: homestead, farm, farmstead, hobby farm, self sufficient, livestock, barn, pasture, field, fence, grass, orchard grass, fescue grass, tall fescue, disk, disc, replant, reseed, over seed, forage, overseed, seed pasture, plant pasture, spreader, broadcast spreader, broadcast seeder, mow weeds, brush, weed, paddock, sow, sow grass seed, sow pasture seed, pasture seed, chain harrow, agri-fab, agri-fab spreader, pull behind spreader, goat, range, graze, rural life, country life

Id: OyImz9q3XA4

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 13 2019