Spraying, gophers, and wasps

Not much exciting going on lately.

The cattle are behaving. Baby is back to normal now that she is not in heat.

I am spraying weeds.  My big effort last year worked well.  I got rid of most of the weeds.  Now to keep the pressure on.  Another year I had beat back the weeds, I slacked off the next year and the weeds came back with a vengeance.  I notice the weeds I do have look young.  The seeds from past years are sprouting.

I have finished the NE and north pasture and the hayfield.  In the past a tank of herbicide would take 45 minutes to an hour to empty.  With less weeds, it takes me 2 and 1/2 hours to empty the tank.

When spraying in the hayfield I noticed some fresh pocket gopher mounds of dirt.   Once the cattle are gone I'll take care of them.   I did find in the middle of the middle pasture a few fresh pocket gopher mounds.  The middle of the middle and nowhere else? Where did these pocket gophers come from?   I am working on trapping them.  I got a few but the last two are a challenge.   One pocket gopher is among a large tree's roots.  When I do find a tunnel among the roots the gopher will fill that trap and tunnel with dirt and I struggle to find a new tunnel among the large roots.

The other pocket gopher tunnel is near a wasp hole.  About 18 inches away.  The first time the gopher filled the trap and hole with dirt. The next time the gopher appears to have abandoned the tunnel hole as I saw wasps come out of it.  I've given up for now as the wasps sting me when I try to find a new tunnel nearby.  And since these are ground wasps their sting hurts a lot more than other wasps or bees.

It must be because of the hot and dry summer but there are a lot more ground wasp holes around than normal.  Usually I come across one each Summer.  This Summer... I must have "discovered" a half dozen to eight of them.  "Discovery" is usually painful with several stings.  When I toss a shovel full of dirt on the small hole with one or two wasps flying around I quickly discovered that there are a lot of wasps outside the hole so tossing dirt to seal the hole does not trap most of the wasps inside.  It just makes the wasps outside the hole really angry.