Pasture Disking

The pasture has finally been disked!  Since the fields have not been plowed up in at least 50 years it took three times over with the disk to break all the sod.  We also had giant ant hills in this pasture that got broken down with the disk.  This field looks really great now with no trees, no big clumps in it and all the junk grass dead!  This process took about 4 hours for roughly 10 acres.  The average price per acre in this area is $10-20 for disking. 

There is now only one process left for this section:  PLANTING THE SEED.  I will be extremely excited to get this part completed and be done worrying about it for the year.  Then in the spring I can begin worrying again about it coming up!  Our seed is ready at the seed dealer and we can plant anytime after November 15th and before the ground freezes -called frost seeding.  It will just be a matter of which day our guy can plant it and throw the fertilizer on.  He will broadcast seed it then pull the harrow over it so it goes in the soil.  This method is less time consuming and less costly than seed drilling due to the different sizes of seed and the need to plant them separately with the drill.

This has been a long and time consuming process and I'm not really looking forward to doing the larger field next year, but I am looking forward to a beautiful pasture that can sustain lots more animals than we currently have and give us our own hay for winter! I am sure my husband will want to purchase a hay baler next so we don't have to pay someone to do that!  

Anyway, progress is being made and soon it will be completed.  I have learned a lot of things while trying to get this first section completed and will already be aware of the in's and out's of the next section so it shouldn't be near as time consuming.  In the end it should make for some happy cows, horses and goats!