Creating Pasture For Sheep

This past month we have been busy creating additional year-round pasture for our sheep. This has involved both getting irrigation to the hill pasture and creating vegetative barriers to prevent erosion of top soil when we plow and plant pasture. We completed the irrigation system yesterday We also had some help from the NRCS crew yesterday: they came our to help dibble in the plants for the vegetative barriers. It rained last weekend and the soil was just right to till the beds in preparation for the grass plugs. A native plant nursery raised California Blue Rye Grass for us. All we had to do was pop out the plugs and stick them in the holes made by the dibble. However, the soil was so soft that everyone soon abandoned the dibbles and just made a little hole with their finger for the plug. It took the eight of us about three hours to plant a plug every six inches for the whole 2,600 feet of barrier. We will have to protect the seedlings until they reach their full size of about 18" in diameter and 24" in height. After that we just have to make sure that the sheep never eat them lower than 3 inches. After the vegetative barriers are established we will till and replant the strips of pasture between the barriers. That way any runoff from tilling will be caught by the barriers and our soil will stay put.