Hiatus

The sky was so brilliant that I sat on the grass and watched the clouds for a while before getting the tractor fired up to do some slashing.  As I was sitting with the dog, I noticed the goats lie down in the paddock, it was the first time they had both been down at same time out in the open.

There is 12km of of slashing to do in the hardwood plantation.  I am taking advantage of a couple of dry days to do the first round on the guildford grass/onion weed.   The slasher can barely cope with it when it is young and dry and you can only run it for an hour before it overheats.    I will head out again tomorrow as soon as the dew dries off.   We will try and slash again a couple of times before it flowers in August.  According to Vic Ag Department:

Onion grass is highly sensitive to close defoliation. Cutting to one centimetre above ground at three to five week intervals reduced onion grass corm mass by 70 per cent, seed pod density by 100 per cent and plant density by 60 per cent compared with the non-defoliated control. Cutting to five centimetres above ground also reduced onion grass corm mass by 58 per cent, seed pod density by 94 per cent and plant density by 35 per cent. Cutting at flowering only considerably reduced seed pod numbers (90 per cent), and corm mass to a lesser degree (27 per cent), but did not affect onion grass plant density.

We tried mowing the onion weed in the summer paddock with the Ransomes Cylinder Mower, but the the cutters made no impression on it.  We may have to use a metsulphuron-methyl herbicide which won’t affect the kikuyu.