Raise the fertility and good things start showing up

A year ago I wrote a little essay on building up fertility in our pastures and how this leads to more legumes. Here is Emerson again this year, about a month later in the season.

The yellow flowers are birdsfoot trefoil, the pink is red clover and the long dandelion-like leaves are chicory.

Here’s a wider shot.

We’re nearing the end of the growing season of the third year under our tall/mob grazing scheme. My hope is that next year all this legume activity will have boosted the available soil nitrogen enough to give the grasses a gain.

In the first spring we farmed here Emerson was full of moss and weak grasses. The two following years have improved the legume situation but I won’t declare this a success until we can get improvement in our grasses, too. Still, it looks good.