Clearing Your Horse Pasture

I want program participants to learn not only from my mistakes, but also from my experience as a whole. The most important team effort that we have ever had at the horse lot is the clearing of the New Land. The picture above shows what the New Land looked like after a year of clearing. A lot of people put tremendous effort into getting the nearly twenty acres cleared.

Knowing what I know now, the job would have been easier, and much faster, if our first step had been to fence in small sections of the brush and put the goats to work clearing the land.

The next step would have been to fence in smaller sections and let the hogs do their job clearing the land.

After that was done it would be time to step in with the chain saw.

But herein lies the beauty of learning. Their is no statue of limitations on applying life's lessons. An ocean of poison ivy had kept me out of a thicket of perhaps two acres on the new land. I had not studied it at all. Last week I walked through and found five volunteer pecan trees in the small grove of primarily ash trees. Our livestock will clear this area for us. I will gradually remove nearly all of the trees in the area and replace them with  nut and fruit producing trees. I will leave the mimosa trees because they are legumes and they work hard to build a powerful network of nitrogen fixing bacteria under the soil.

Our Scottish Highland are great browsers and giving them access to the areas being cleared not only will bring in manure to enrich the soil but will also bring in soil building microbes from their saliva.

The resulting food forest will be a boon to wildlife and will be a spectacular classroom for programs on twenty years into the future.

We are in this for the long haul.