Weed control on a budget

When we bought this place, it was covered with Musk Thistle.  I waged a war with that devilish plant, using only a  hoe, and after several years I got them under control.  The former next-door neighbor did nothing with his thistles, and you can imagine my consternation when his thistles grew ten feet tall.  Each year the wind would waft their little dandelion-like seeds onto my place.  
The joke was on me.  Several years ago, for no apparent reason, the neighbor's thistles became fewer each year, finally disappearing.  Turns out some little bug was imported from someplace, a bug that lives in thistle flowers and eventually kills the thistles.  The neighbor, I'm sure, never knew what happened. He probably didn't even notice they were gone. 

Nowadays our main plant pest is this:

It invades our pasture and hay crop.  Mowing does little to discourage it.  There is quite a bit of this stuff growing in our hay, especially in the alfalfa-orchard grass patch.  Because the plant is so big, so thick-stalked, it doesn't cure at the same rate as the hay, and messes up spots in the bales.  Not to mention those thousands of seeds at the top of each plant that creates more such plants wherever we feed the hay.  

You can see how thick they are in places

I told Cliff that after he mowed, I would get out there and pick up as many as I could. He told me to pile them up and he'd take them to the ditch with the forks on the tractor.

This is one of four piles, placed on a bare spot where we fed the cows last winter.  

I was piling some weeds on the other side of the electric fence.  The horses came along and started picking through the pile, just in case I was tossing some good stuff their way.

  
I think I've done all the weed gathering I'm going to do for this season.  
I'm hoping some farmer will come along and tell me what the name of the weed is.  Cliff calls it horse-weed, but I know that isn't the proper name.  I went to Google images but didn't see anything exactly like my weed.  Dock looked vaguely similar.  Could it be dock?

Mowing hay

This was a sight for sore eyes this morning.  Finally, we may have (cross your fingers) enough nice days to mow, cure, and bale hay.  

This is the field with alfalfa in it.  We asked for clover seed and paid for clover seed, but alfalfa is what we ended up with, along with the orchard grass we put with it.  Had we known we were planting alfalfa, it would have been seeded a lot heavier and we wouldn't have bothered with the orchard grass.  Pure alfalfa hay is worth a pretty penny.  

Cliff likes to cut alfalfa at 1/4 bloom, but with all the rain that was impossible, so it's in full bloom.  The cows will like it fine and it will be OK for them; it just won't have as many nutrients as it could have had.


 
Chickie is spending the day in the chicken house with the big girls and guys.  She is safely in her cage with her own food and water, but this way she has company.  Everybody can get used to one another without the big chickens getting a chance to kill the little one.  

I am going to try and get back to regular blogging.  Facebook truly does distract one from doing blog entries, and if I had to pick and choose between the two, I would choose blogging, hands down.  I temporarily deleted my Facebook account, probably only for a few days, so I wouldn't be distracted from my goal of giving more attention to my blog.  I had to smile when I clicked on the link that would disable Facebook for me:  Suddenly there were pictures of several of my Facebook friends, and under the pictures, "Meesha will miss you" and "David will miss you" and, most pathetic of all, under the picture of a granddaughter, "Monica will miss you."  
She would be least likely of any of my 402 Facebook friends to miss me there, I'm sure.  She's a teenager, after all.  I doubt that my activities and updates are of much interest to her.   

In the garden, the onions are going to seed even though they haven't gotten far in onion development.  Tomatoes got such a late start with the cool weather, I will be lucky to have tomatoes by August.  Usually we have tomatoes in the first couple weeks of July.  
The recent plantings are faring better than early crops.  Okra planted last week is up and so are the late beets and cabbage seeds.  I planted two short rows of sweet corn and am hoping for the best.  Green beans should be blooming in a couple of days, and I'm searching through my seeds trying to find something to plant in the few open spaces I have left.  

So there you have it.