Summer Forage, Near End

It's almost the peak of summer, yet it is time to start getting ready for the next forage cycle: late fall, winter and spring. 

Mature millet with cowpeas growing up on on them create a dense stand of forage, 3 to 4 feet tall, in the north beaver field.   Sheep were put in here yesterday and they have yet to work their way to this spot.

In the middle beaver field, I am mowing the millet and cowpea stubble and uneaten weeds left by the sheep.  Prior to sheep grazing, it looked much like the north beaver field on the left. 

In the next few weeks we will be planting oats using a seed drill into the mowed fields.  Usually any weed regrowth is sprayed with glyphosate herbicide at planting time. 

The sheep are working here in the bulldozer annexe, which is connected to the north beaver field.   This is a 2-foot tall stand of cowpeas with no millet.  

In the spring when we planted the cowpeas the soils were damp and almost immediately after planting we got a rain that settled the dirt around the seed.   The seed sprouted within a couple days.  Since the millet has to be planted separately from the cowpeas (differential seed settling in the hopper and different optimum planting depths) we ran out of time to plant the millet before the cowpeas started coming up in some of the fields.