Thank you for replying. I’m waiting on soil test results and then plan to fertilize and over seed. I’ll pursue what you do.
Good luck! I have not fully eradicated the foxtail from our 30ac farm, I think that’s impossible. We have a mole population that results in new bare spots, supporting what other posters mentioned about seeds lying dormant for years. However, in all other parts of the field, no foxtail!
I do have two guys working to keep the moles in check.
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I love it! The mole busters!
I’ve got a plan and thought I’d share. Just yesterday read that foxtail is an annual thus the need for all the seedheads to keep it going year after year.
Got an idea in my head that what if I could BURN the tall seed heads? Turns out that idea IS legit.
A colleague at work said people walk around with torches to kill weeds where she camps.
Now, I worked in the ER in college so little Connie Caution here sees him with that tank so close and things holy moly dude. But there’s gotta be a way to be safe and still spend a few hours and make serious seedhead death progress and stop the disaster I see happening in my pastures and out along the road.
Any of you use torches for weed control?
Ha. So we were looking to buy a tractor and went to see one at this guy’s place. He and his son do some small farming.
They’d built this thing on a…I guess it was a commercial mower frame? With the deck removed? One of those large push but self propelled jobs. Maybe 3 and a half or four feet across. They’d rigged it up with 4 or 5 propane jets along the front so they could burn the weeds out of entire row before planting.
It was CRAZY. Like amazing MacGyvering but HA holy cow. I guess it worked for them! No feedback on the number of barns burnt down in the process 
OMG! That IS crazy.
A single burner seems so tame in comparison! Worth a try!
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If you don’t have many plants that could be do-able. I only have foxtail in my big pasture now in a few places and my horse has lots of other grass to eat. If I tried that approach I would spend days out there and as dry as it is I would set the whole property on fire. I am not burning ANYTHING here at the moment.
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And you make a good point. It’s not dry here and we’re getting rain Friday and Saturday. I’ve got alot of it - maybe a 1/2 acre in total. I don’t have other solutions and if I don’t do something it’ll just get worse.
I first noticed it years ago and slowly…it’s spreading. I’d had a couple vet calls over the years from it and HATE foxtail. When I’m puling it by bare hand I can feel and nasty barbs.
I usually keep my pasture mowed fairly short, but this year decided to let it grow a bit longer due to sugar content and muzzled horses and such. I lost my mare in July and was left with a single, extremely low-maintenance boarder (yep-you’re-still-on-four-legs kind of fella). Quite frankly, I pretty much lost interest in everything at the barn except the bare minimum.
As such, I let the pasture go for several weeks. We had lots of rain in the meantime, and it got really thick and tall into August, and, all of a sudden, I was inundated with yellow foxtail. We finally got the tractor and implements moved to the farm from our other property because, at that point, the pasture had become too robust for the big zero turn. I bushhogged two consecutive weeks and then used the zero turn last week to mow things down pretty short again. While the weather has been quite warm this week, it’s supposed to turn cool this weekend. The foxtail hasn’t popped back up, and I hope the cooler weather will be the end of it for this season.
So, lesson learned for me. Keep the pastures mowed. It keeps the unwanted stuff at bay and the good grasses strong. I’ve always known that and practiced it, but this year I proved it to myself. Fortunately, I have a lot of pasture for one horse (now two with another boarder), so they have had plenty of other grasses to choose from. But, yeah, the foxtail is nasty.
