And Then There's...

Silage.
Yup, grains and grasses to improve the pasture too.

There's something here called "leafy spurge" or as I call it, leafy SCOURGE. Very pretty yellow flowers. Completely worthless and inedible to animals. Hard to get rid of; so far no one's found anything to strangle it. It is rhizomous, which means it can propagate by seed, but most frequently takes over by the roots, growing year to year. What to do besides digging it all out and burning it - and hoping that you get all of it?

I'm a big believer in strangulation. Well, ok, not for people - they take a swift knockdown like a bullet; the Roundup of the animal world. But for plants - if you don't like what's growing, try to overwhelm it with something you DO like.

So this year I'm going to start preparing the pasture for the future cattle. I've ordered some sweet clover - not the kind you see dotting the roadsides with pretty red and white flowers, but the grassy kind you use for honeybees. And then I'll mix with it some sweet silage, some high-sugar-content grasses specifically for cattle; two kinds of that. then I'll broadcast it over the closest two acres of pasture and see what happens. If it works, then when it goes to seed I'll harvest it and use still more seed next year. I'll plan on increasing my banked seed and pasture proliferation year by year until its time for the cattle.

And then there's the oats and the wheat that I'm going to try too. Hulless oats, so I don't have to beat it to death to get to the oat grain. That will be good not just in my bread but in my breakfast - and the cattle later can feast upon the straw. Because yes I will save the seed from that, too...

Wheat - well, I have a grinder, why not see if wheat will grow here too? And then I can practice making my own flour - unbleached, with all of the naturalness, the nutty wholesome taste, of the wheat germ built right in.

Slow growth. Slow and gradual progression towards a goal. A bumper crop of oats that just might get its seed mixed in with the pasture grasses, too.

I have a purpose and a plan. I am willing to spend a little to test a theory, and to either improve the growth around me that I will eventually come to depend on - or to disprove a theory and try something else later.

I know that folks who have depended on the local pasture, free-range, would probably laugh at me. Meanwhile some of my friends back east have puzzled looks on their faces - why do all this? Why work so hard for cattle that aren't even there yet? Why trouble yourself so hard, and spend so much money, time, and energy, on something that may not work, on a future that may not exist?

Can't help it. When I was planting my peach trees years ago, one of the tiny neighbor children came up to me and asked, "Well, if you aren't getting peaches this year, what's the POINT?" The point is that sustainability takes time, takes work, takes attention, takes investment - and takes a leap of faith. Just moving here was an immense leap of faith. Now, the other smaller leaps towards my realization of self seem almost predestined, preordained, as I grow to meet the challenges I have set for myself. No true gardener believes in Armageddon... because there is always something else to do, to try, to grow, to experiment with.