Growing Grass and Building Trails

We had some great weather so Seth and I decided make a quick trip down to the prop and take care of some chores and get a little bit of our project work done.

I'd read somewhere that wherever you put down hay, grass will grow.  When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense since hay is basically grass.  We have a lot of extra straw left over from cleaning out the goat's stall, so we decided to put this to test idea and make a project out of it.

We've been taking the soiled straw and spreading it out over the areas we've cleared and I'm happy to report that the experiment is a success!  It was exciting to come back after a couple weeks and see grass growing out of the piles we put down.  I'm looking forward to seeing how it takes off when spring gets here.

 

Our other project this winter has been to cut some more trails.  There's a several acre corner of the prop that we originally bypassed because it was so thick that I wasn't able to cut a trail.  Now that I have a bulldozer and a bush hog, I figured  some thick brush and trees would be no problem and we decided to open it up.  Not surprisingly, the bulldozer worked great and we made a trail in a couple hours that would have taken days doing it by hand.

Seth's job was to ride the quad over the freshly bulldozed trail and start packing it down.  As you can see, he threw himself into his work.

Seth managed to get stuck in one of the sinkholes.  He was so hung up in the trees and stumps that I thought we were going to have to use the bulldozer to pull him out.  The  original idea was to make the bowl into a riding area, but it ended up being like a roach motel.  You check in, but you don't check out.  We might have to ponder this experiment a little more.



Before packing the trail down, it's hard to tell the difference between the forest and the trail, but you can definitely feel the difference when you ride it.  No bushes whipping you in the face or stumps to get stuck on.

As I was bulldozing, I pulled up this big, flat rock.  It doesn't look that big in the picture, but it's actually about 3-4 feet high and a uniform 3 or 4 inches thick.  I like to leave interesting rocks around to use as landmarks.  We give them names so we can use them for reference points.  I'm thinking of naming this one keystone since it reminds me of the keystone symbol.