ToDo list and snowberry bushes

I've been busy the past week. I've been working on my list of things to do before the snow comes.  I:

• dug the rest of my garden (potatoes and carrots),
• mowed my large yard,
• raked many of the leaves from around the house and garage and tossed them on my raspberry and strawberry plants and my garden area,
  
• mowed the snowberry bushes out in the pasture

Unfortunately whenever I complete one item on my to-do list I find another to add.  Maybe having an unlucky thirteen items is the root of my problem.

This is the first time I have mowed down all the snowberry bushes.  I have been on a campaign for many years now to get rid of these bushes.  Other than in the middle pasture these bushes were mainly along the fence lines and I have gotten rid of most of them.  The middle pasture had the worst infestation.  I think it was because the middle pasture has the most tree stumps.  The bushes seen to mostly grow from around many of the tree stumps.  I think it is because the birds "planted" them when standing on the stumps.

Spraying an herbicide is about the only way to get rid of the bushes.  But that also takes time and I need that time to spray noxious weeds.  I've seen bushes with one branch - or less than 10% of the bush - alive after spraying because I didn't spray the herbicide on that branch.  Snowberry bushes are very hardy plants.

The best time to spray the bushes is when they are young shoots and before they get old enough to harden into a woody plant.  Also the cattle seem to munch on the young shoots and not the woody plants.

That is why I decided to mow the bushes I hadn't gotten to spraying this year.  Next year when they start anew the double combo of cattle or herbicide should really get rid of many snowberry bushes and reclaim some of my pasture.