Maybe I started a little early this year based on the amount of moisture in the ground, but since we've been getting rain every week I figured I'd wait until it was dry "enough" and give it a try. It was a little slick, but I've got my vegetable beds plowed into the alfalfa field. I've walked around the farm the over the past few days to see how things are coming up. The new alfalfa looks good but something is living in the middle of the field digging some huge holes and leaving very impressive dirt hills. I'm sure that when we're cutting hay it will be a shock every time we drive up over one of these mounds hidden in the alfalfa stand. The holes look like they've been made by a ground hog (wood chuck), but they are kind of unusual around here. Not that we haven't seen them on the farm, but I think we've seen one on our farm in a decade. I looked over the pasture yesterday. It looks like I have a good stand of alfalfa coming up in the brome from the frost seeding. I'm not an expert on small alfalfa so I pulled some up and took it along with some white clover up to the house for closer study. Small alfalfa looks like sorrel and really I can't tell the difference. So as a last test I tasted it. It wasn't sour like sorrel so I'm assuming it's alfalfa. I guess I'll know better in a few weeks when it has had time to get more mature. I also walked along the field break that runs the west side of the pasture. There are two rows of shrub/trees and a row of evergreen cedar trees. What a mess. I'm down to one row of shrub/trees and a about a half row of cedars. If I was intending to grow thistles it would be a huge success. I guess I'll disk out the first row of what used to be tree/shrub and in between the other trees and put down oats in an effort to smother out the thistle. Then I'll put in a row new of trees next spring and go for another more permanent grass between all of the trees. I'm also short on blue spruce trees as part of the "living snow fence" that runs down the lane. I'd have to say that when I had the idea of running native fruit and nut bearing trees and evergreens a half mile from the north end of the farm to the south end of the farm I never imagined that I'd have such a struggle with keeping them going and keeping the weeds in check. Hind sight being what it is and knowing what I know now I should have known that when I had to smother out the alfalfa around the trees it would have created a break in the soil which created the opportunity for other plants to jump in. Any future trees should be incorporated into a more complex environment that can live in sync with the trees.
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