When do you plant pastures?

Answer 1

Mid spring is the best time to plant pasture grasses. The seeds have to be fertilized and then packed down so they grow better. DO NOT GRAZE FOR A YEAR. If you do that is the quickest way to kill your pasture. The roots have to establish themselves enough so that they will be able to propogate for the years to come. It also gives the plants enough time to reseed themselves and grow tillers to increase your pasture yield per acre.

Often when the grasses first come up the pasture will be just covered in weeds. Don't be alarmed. All you have to do is cut the weeds down with a swather or haybine. Once you get the weeds off (get them baled up right away so you don't kill the newly seeded grasses underneath), the grass will really take off and a person wouldn't know that you had weeds on there in the first place. The advantage of grasses is that their growth points are low to the ground, so if you cut the weeds you don't hurt the grasses. Most weeds are not part of the grass family, which means that their growth points are at the top of the plant, not near the ground. So if you cut off grasses that are trying to grow, don't panic, they will grow back, and remarkably quickly. The grass can grow so fast that the weeds won't even have time to rejuvenate themselves: the new grass will just choke them out. Some weeds are grasses, but in a pasture they are still grasses, and the livestock will eat them most of the time. Quack grass, for example, is a favorite of cattle. It is considered a weed in crops, but in pastures, they're just part of the whole equation.

The reason I recommend to cut your weeds instead of spray them is because it is cheaper to cut or mow them instead of spending more money on buying herbicide, spending the time to get everything mixed the right way, etc. It's cheaper to cut/mow, plus it's faster as well.