Tell you what, you buy me a couple of Comstock or Koro live traps and I'll bring you a few beavers. Just pay the gas over there and I keep the traps.

I appreciate that but I've got a guy that is supposed to be bringing me some of those Bankhead beavers with the northern generics already..........I'm gonna turn them lose in my sanctuary.

I'm starting to get some actual clover coming back now....Volunteer crimson clover in July???

I don’t think that the late May mowing really thinned the dog fennel any but I do think it set it back to where its allowing much more diversity to come in. This is the same spot where the turkey was nested.

Here’s a couple of “before and after” pics showing the new flush of growth where I mowed some of the other areas back in May compared to the older growth. The idea now is that I go out there probably after this rain moves through and set some more of the tall stuff (not the already mowed sections) back and hit the reset button on it so another new flush comes up in a couple weeks when it starts recovering. This area has really increased in the amount of goldenrod this year for whatever reason. The deer browse it moderately. There's still a good bit of dewberry present in it too which the deer browse across many. many months including during the winter.

Goldenrod:
https://www.honeybeesuite.com/goldenrod-a-late-summer-feast-for-the-bees/

Patches of teaweed are beginning to sprout up as well.......These are excellent late summer food sources with protein content nearly equivalent to soybeans.........Both the taller patch in the back and the small sprouts in the foreground are teaweed. You can see the browsing pressure already on the taller stuff......

I need to get some tea weed seed and spread in my long leaf next year after I burn.

You need to get you some Johnson grass. They will bed in it and they will eat it. It’s high in protein.

A jug of 24D would have that place looking real nice again in no time

Dig some up, transplant it when things are moist, and stick an exclusion cage around it so it can fully mature

Theys everything but a tractor in this thread.

😂

Obviously there’s no tractor nor Bush hog on the premises.

What do you feel would have been a more appropriate title........"A Lil' Weed Time"????

Coming soon!!!!!!............."A Lil' Goat Time".....????

Tractor……….



And oh my lord what is that?????

You too high to notice you runnin trough a forest with that lil disk

I beg to differ sir……..I know exactly what I’m running through and why.

So whether we’re talking about pokeweed or goldenrod or dog fennel or dew berry, etc……..by having mowed some areas back in late May, right now I have two different stages of growth of the same plant species/communities……Some fresh sprouts and some much more mature….……when I go mow tomorrow and knock back more strips of mature growth, I will create a third stage….and another few weeks I may mow some more remaining mature areas one more time and create a 4th………If you count the buffer strips of dog fennel and sich that haven’t been mowed at all then it would be 5…….This begins to make the understory a lot more dynamic and provide fresh flushes of growth and cover throughout the summer a lot more than if everything were just in one single stage….like if say you had burned in the spring and that was it. It’s very possible to do this with a tractor and bushhog/disk and likely gonna be one of the best options for many people……maybe you do it in thinning rows or something like that…….

If you get the idea now of how this process makes the understory more dynamic from the standpoint of food and cover…..then imagine if we had say 15+ stages interwoven with each very randomly all in a continual daily rotation as the cattle herd roamed around and grazed at their discretion. In a nutshell I think that is what you could accomplish by running a light stocking density of cattle through a place every other year or maybe every third year. It would create very fertile, dynamic understory habitat. Other "tools" would still need to be used but they would be a very valuable edition to the habitat management toolbox. I know a lot of this is just being repeated but it took some people 10 years to listen to the other ideas soooooooooo........

Goldenrod is said to have an allelopathic effect on some plants around it……….. "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven"






Notice the color difference…….We'll see how it plays out.......…To be continued……….