2024-12-17

Changes in the land! Over the last 10 years I've spent a lot of time driving in circles dragging a 5ft bush hog behind my little tractor, knocking down our acres of open fields and whatever the animals don't eat in the fenced pastures. This year I really worked to do as little as possible, and it is work to unlearn prejudices toward clean open spaces and the judgment (real or perceived) of the neighbors.

So this year I limited myself to mowing:

• The edges of the unfenced fields, to keep the pioneer species from encroaching on the areas we may still want to plant.
• The paths in the woods, otherwise they cease to be paths and become blood extraction avenues of brambles and ticks.
• The fenced pastures, after each time the animals rotated through (so 2-3 times each). If we don't do this the things the sheep don't / shouldn't eat overrun the things they do / should.
• A strip around the outside of the fenced areas, to prevent the sheep from mangling the fences trying to get at good stuff outside and provide a line of sight on sneaky predators / escaped neighbor dogs.
• A small "front yard" bit that is too shaded to grow much and provides overflow parking when needed.
• A small area in the back acreage by our pond, which has a fire pit and gazebo and is a favorite place to relax and connect with friends and visitors / go swimming if you like very cold water.

The rest of the "yard" areas that I used to mow are now mostly food forest / garden beds (of which we now have ~900 square ft). The random unused spaces around our walking paths and between beds are scythed into mulch by my badass partner.

This reduction brought our diesel consumption down to about 7 gallons for the year, about 1/3 of what we used to use. I'd guess about 15 acres of formerly-mowed land went untouched this year. The hope here is that as native plants thrive (and wow did we have a lot of goldenrod) they will provide habitat and fodder for critters and insects, places where native edible plants can expand into, and deep root stuctures will start to break up the heavy, compacted clay out there from years of farming with heavy machinery.

In other places where we've done this there have been occasional fast growing trees, mostly black locust, popping up in the middle of fields. In these cases I generally let them grow and provide some much needed shade and root growth in these large fields. We'll see how things look in the spring. The goal isn't necessarily to re-wild these areas, but rather to do a few cycles of pioneer plants to work some fertility and biodeversity into the soil ahead of... whatever we decide to do there next.