Cattle, garden, gophers and weeds

The cattle behaved themselves today and stayed mainly in the eastern part of the south pasture. Else they decided the effort to "escape" to where they were yesterday wasn't worth the effort?

Therefore I concentrated on my garden. The past week I have worked on weeding my garden as it badly needs weeding. I had trouble finding my carrots, beets and onions in amongst the weeds. Yes, my garden was that bad.

I now have two thirds of the garden weeded. All the lower height crops and their surrounding areas are weeded, and most of the rest of the taller (corn, peas, beans, tomatoes, etc) crops also are weeded.

The tomato plants have grown into large bushes. Too large to place more old tires around tomato plants to keep them warmer at night. Even with our hot temperatures of the mid 80s F during the day, our overnight lows are in the mid to upper 40s. The air is that dry.

The tomato plants are so large I now can't use my tomato cages to help keep the plants off the ground. I had to round up a variety of sticks and place them around the plants to keep their branches off the ground. The plants look more like bushes than "trees".

This morning I spent a few hours and watered (soaked) the crops. A benefit of the weeds is that they were so thick that they shaded the ground and retained the moisture longer. The disadvantage is that the weeds held back the crops. The plants in the areas I weeded last week seem to be noticeably bigger today.

The pocket gopher is still in the garden. I had seen an open pocket gopher hole by a fruit tree was now plugged with dirt. Since no activity on my trap in the garden I thought this pocket gopher moved once again. I moved the trap. Less than an hour later I found the hole in the garden was plugged with fresh dirt. I went to retrieve the trap and found a dead pocket gopher in it. 24 hours later and again no activity in the garden. *argh* This gopher is one wary animal.

I haven't gotten any more gophers in the pasture. Several leghold traps had been triggered but no gopher. Not sure why, perhaps something else was between the trap arms when it closed and the gopher was able to slip out? I had been trying to place a light amount of dirt to cover the trap. Maybe some debris got mixed in?

For one conibear trap the gopher plugged the hole with dirt rather than try to use it and go through my trap. I miss when I first started and easily trapped the dumb gophers.

The depressing part is that I found a half dozen holes in the north pasture have been re-opened. A gopher chirping a warning alerted me that I should re-check some of the holes. The re-opened holes are not just one or two in one "subdivision", but spread out over at least three subdivisions. Where are the gophers coming from?!! What makes it easy for them is that I can cover the openings to the holes but the underground network of holes are still open and ready to easily move into.

Also depressing is that I found quite a number of goat's beard weeds in the north pasture as I checked the gopher traps. The western sun was just right to light the weeds up. One weed after another. The cattle had eaten them down earlier when they were in this pasture, but now the weeds have sent up new stalks and seed pods. The deer must be wandering through this pasture as I also found quite a number of stalks that were partially eaten. The stalks are too recent for my cattle to have eaten them.

Gophers and weeds. I can't win.