Pasture Patrol

In preparation for the alpacas, who are coming sometime this week, we had the pasture field-mowed. Jordan, the local boy I hired off Craig's list and his mid-sized kubata could only do about half the feild, because of debris and large rocks in the other half. This photo does a fair job of showing the difference between the mowed and the non-mowed halves.

The goats love the mowed field. They can see each other. They were literally over their heads before, and the littlest one kept getting lost and crying for his mama. I'm hoping that they will do a decent job of getting blackberries and other weeds as they grow back.
But we still have a problem with the Poison Hemlock. My friend Sarah, garden authority, warned me that topping them was unlikely to do any good; that most likely it would simply spur them to produce more heads. She was right. But I thought, well, maybe REPEATED cutting will fix 'em! I bought a gas powered weed-eater and we cut them all down again, pulling as many out by the root as we could reach and our backs could stand. And of course, many were mowed to the ground again yesterday. I think it might be late enough in the growing season now that they won't be able to stage a comeback.

But.

Our neighbor to the east (there's no neighbor there yet, it's just raw land) has a large stand of them, tall and flowery and waving in the breeze. I don't have their number to call and ask if I can cut them down, but I'm thinking of doing it anyway. I might talk to the next neighbor over, the one on the other side. He has cows, and Hemlock will poison them easier than it will poison goats, so maybe he will agree that it's okay to go cut. Or maybe he has their number.