Small stuff before I leave

Before leaving for my vacation I tended to a number of small projects.

I was surprised to find that the horses ate all of the remaining hay I had put out for the cattle before the cattle left.  Usually horses are finicky eaters, closer to cats than dogs in this respect, and since the hay I put out for the cattle was two years old, I thought the horses would pick at it like they did with the leftover hay I had fed the cattle this past Spring.  Instead the horses ate all of the hay within a few days.  It wasn't like they were hungry as they have plenty of green grass in the pasture.  Apparently they wanted something different to eat.

With the feeder clean of hay I took the temporary floor out of it, cleaned the matted hay off the boards, then put the boards away for the winter.

I also finished using the rest of the herbicide, Brash.  When I visited the CHS store, I asked Linda if there were any new herbicides that would handle my weeds and she told me about Chaparral.

(More info on Chaparral: http://www.dowagro.com/range/products/chaparral.htm)

Chaparral is different than Brash in that Chaparral is a dry formula and not a liquid one.   Linda told me to use a tablespoon of Chaparral in my backpack sprayer for the weeds I have.  When I read the Chaparral label the amount per acre varies depending on the weed I am trying to kill, and the amount of Chaparral for the sprayer is dependant on the sprayer's flow rate, which I do not know.

Because we are in a dry period right now, the weeds' metabolism is slow and it takes longer for the herbicide to take affect.  So I wanted to make sure I sprayed a few tanks of herbicide on a variety of weeds, including the snowberry (buckbrush) I have.  When I return from vacation in a few weeks I can see if the tablespoon amount was enough.  Part of my concern on the amount of Chaparral to use is that when I spoke with the man who owns the horses he told me he just started using Chaparral on some wormwood he had and the results were mixed on how much wormwood was killed.

So I was spraying weeds right up until almost when I left to catch the train for Washington.

Here is the herbicide in my sprayer.

While I thought I has cleared my pasture of gophers, when spraying for weeds I found new gophers mounds in three areas where I had last cleared them from the middle pasture.  *sigh*