Lavender bed, new pasture

Louise brought us a dozen or so lavender plants, left over from her exhibit at the San Francisco Garden show.

This morning I mixed a batch of roundup from the concentrate that was left in the hose-end sprayer from last year, and went over the strip to the right of the driveway. While I was at it, I used the sprayer also on the grass that has sprouted up in the vegetable garden over the winter.

Then Ken, the Gentleman Farmer, arrived to start putting in pasture for us. He took his tractor down from the big flatbed truck, and started by mowing. With his mower, he was able to chop up all those big piles of brush left over from pulling fences, blackberries, and chopping down oversupply eucalyptus trees last year.

He used the tractor bucket and a big chain to lift out the fence posts and fence wire knotted with Johnson grass that I had been unable to pull by hand.

Then we discussed discing. At first he thought that the place was still too wet, but I worried that if we waited longer we would be too dry in most spots. Ken and I wandered around with a shovel, and he agreed. “It’s like you have totally different soil in different spots,” he said.

So he began to disc, which turns up about 4 inches of soil. It wasn’t long, though, before his tractor got stuck in the wettest part of the yard. He tried all the tricks he knew to use the bucket to lift himself, or place fenceposts under the wheels, but eventually he had to resort to digging with a shovel. Took him over an hour.

Anyway, he disced everything that wasn’t too wet to work behind the house, and the area in front of the fence to the left of the house. Then he used a chain harrow to smooth out the soil.

Finally he broadcast our all grass horse pasture mix at 50 pounds per acre (the usual rate is 25 pounds per acre), with the chain harrow dragging behind to cover the seed.

The all grass horse pasture mix we purchased from Le Ballister’s Seed (at $1.09 per pound) is:

50% tetraploid perennial rye
30% orchardgrass, paiute
20% ryegrass, annual

We also planted Le Ballister’s “Insectary Seed Mix” in the area in front of the fence to the left of the house. He had me broadcast it by hand, because the amount of tilled up grass there would foul the chain harrow, he said. After I broadcast the seed, he turned the chain harrow over and used the smoother side of it to cover the seed. The insectary mix costs $6.45/pound, and contains:

California Buckwheat (Eriogonium Fasciculatum)
Yarrow (Achillea Millefolium)
Coriander (Coriandorum Sativum)
White Alyssum (Lobularia Maritima)
Baby’s Breath (Gupsophila)
Rose Clover (Trifolium Hirtum)
Tidy Lips (Layia Platyglossa)
Crimson Clover (Trifolium Incarnatum)
California Blue Bell (Phacella Campanularia)
California Poppy (Eschscholzia California)