Between Showers

Mowing the Canadian Thistles continues between rain showers and other farm activities. This is the on-going project, as a patch of thistles begin to fill out purple blooms, I run the tractor with a rotary mower over the patch to knock the blooms off the plants so they cannot reproduce.

The side ground between the hill and hay field is the current patch of thistles that I am working on. This spot is a little trickier than mowing on the flat ground. I have to keep the tractor running rows up and down while avoiding side-hill. The mowing deck needs to be manually adjusted constantly because of all the dips and valleys on the terrain.

The weeds have been growing furiously during this mild summer. Some of the stems are between 3 and 4 feet tall with patches so thick that it is hard to see the ground that I’m driving on, so it is a slow-go as I avoid the old growth stump fragments that are still sticking up out of the ground at 2 and 3 feet tall.

I am also on the lookout for gopher holes as I traverse the hill. The trapping that was done in the early spring helped to thin out the critters, but they have been multiplying ever since the grass grew too high to see the gopher mounds. Once I get the patch mowed, the trapping can begin again.