Pasture rehab: buttercup vs grass: to mow or...?

[PonyRiderMom]

This place we moved onto used to be a farm but hasn’t been used that way in decades. Some of the pastures were maintained, and some were not, or were maintained very infrequently.

The pasture I’m struggling with the most is low lying and obviously has not gotten a lot of love over the years. It looks like it was probably mowed once a year and otherwise ignored.

We got in there and brushhogged all the brambles and tall weeds and junk, and I was super happy to find decent grass in there under that stuff. However the other thing I found was buttercups. It’s actually mostly grass but then there’s patches of buttercups or buttercups mixed with grass.

What I’m wondering is, will scalping these patches with my mower, or cutting them down to zero with my weed whacker, help or hurt the grass relative to the buttercups? I mean the patches where there’s grass and buttercups mixed. I really just want to scalp it, but I don’t want to kill my newly-uncovered grass.

If mowing would be worse for the grass than for the buttercups, what are my options aside from pesticides? There’s a creek nearby that flows into a salmon stream and then out into the ocean, and I don’t want to be dumping poison in there.

I’m the maritime PNW so it’s still grass growing season here. And it’s obviously weed growing season also.

[Simkie]

Buttercups don’t mind mowing, unfortunately. If you’re looking for a non herbicide solution, liming the field will help. 2,4-D is good on buttercups, and late fall is a great time to spray. Talk to your extension office about your stream & how best to protect that.

[JB]

Contact your county extension agency. Scalping ground to try to kill weeds is more likely to kill the grass, and leave the weeds.

You need to know which kind(s) of buttercups you have in order to properly target them - chemical and timing. And, what other weeds you have

Fall is generally not the best time to target most things, since most things should be actively growing, or getting ready to sprout (a pre-emergent weed killer) to be effective.

[Janet]

I have also heard that adding lime is the best way to reduce the buttercups, and it won’t hurt the grass.

[JB]

Adding lime when the pH is already grass-friendly does hurt the grass

Not all buttercup issues are a pH issue

[Montanas_Girl]

Buttercups love acid soil, and almost all pastures and fields run towards the acidic side, pH wise, so liming certainly won’t hurt. But a soil test is cheap and will tell you exactly how much lime you need to add (in 2-3 applications over a year or so, if the soil is very acidic).

Fall is the best time of year to spray for buttercup and other weeds, in most parts of the U.S. You get a much more effective kill with fall spraying, especially with woody and other hard-to-control species.

[SusanO]

Not only check for pH but also do some work on getting the areas with buttercups less compacted soil wise. The places I have the worst buttercups are areas that have a lot of manure, stay wet and the soil is pretty compacted. And not to mention acidic. Spraying a herbicide will help but you need to change the soil conditions to keep them from taking over again.

[foggybok]

When I lived in the PNW we had buttercup in the low lying areas. I asked the county extension guy what to do and he said “move”. They actually had a project going testing various herbicides and none were great. The western WA buttercup is going to grow in wet areas. The best thing we found was mowing ( not to the ground) and spreading wood ash for pH. That seemed to help the most. But it will be a never ending battle out there

[PonyRiderMom]

That’s really interesting about the soil ph. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that – I already limed a couple of different areas the last few months. And I just went out and checked one of them now. There used to be a ton of buttercups in there, in the low-lying part of that paddock. And now there are very few.

I know I need to get a soil test, but I keep putting it off. However, what I wrote above does suggest that liming this pasture might help. I need to read up on the canary grass that’s in there and make sure the lime won’t hurt it, though. That stuff grows like weeds (which I guess it technically is) and the horses love it. Maybe I can just lime where the grass and buttercups are, and avoid the canary grass.

[SusanO]

Soil tests used to be pretty cheap - $7 a test although I am sure they are higher now. And you could list the crop you wanted to grow in the area and the extension service would tell you which nutrients you needed to add and how much.

[PonyRiderMom]

I went out and took a picture today. This is a wet shady corner of my paddock, and the neighbor’s property is on the other side of the fence. When the horses got here, my side of the fence looked like his – mostly buttercups and a little grass. I had the horses out in that paddock for two straight months, and at the end of that time this space was mostly buttercups and dirt, with no grass. I limed and reseeded, and look at it now! Almost all grass and no buttercups. I didn’t even pull them up or anything, now that I think about it. It was just a combination of being trampled and, I think, the lime.

So yeah I will lime this other pasture. I do it by hand with a hand spreader that can hold 50 pounds at a time. I probably need about a ton for that pasture. But I’ll do it. It sure helped a lot in this other area.

[walktrot]

We have plenty of buttercups around here and the horses aren’t interested in them. As long as they can graze and/or eat their hay they ignore them. They are primarily under the fence lines. As long as they have enough to eat they don’t have any need for them and apparently they have no attraction. .

[cardinale]

@PonyRiderMom

I do it by hand with a hand spreader that can hold 50 pounds at a time. I probably need about a ton for that pasture.

Where do you get your lime? Do you get e.g. the pelleted lime sold by the bag? Which store (I’m also in SW WA)?

[JB]

If your pasture is big enough, it pays, literally and figuratively, to have someone come spread with a truck. It’ll cost you a lot more to buy 50 40lb bags (1 ton), multiplied by the number of acres (often when you need lime, you need 1T/acre) than to have someone deliver it in bulk and spread it.

[PonyRiderMom]

Yes it’s the pearlized stuff and I get it at Wilco (in Bremerton).

@JB I have tried and tried and tried to find someone who would do this, especially given that I have another pasture that’s at least five acres and there’s no way I can hand spread lime out there. But apparently no one does this kind of work out here any more. So it may be that eventually I’ll rent a tractor and get a bunch of lime delivered, and try to spread it myself. Buying a tractor isn’t currently in our budget and I’m still not 100% convinced that we need one.

[JB]

well that sucks Does anyone at least supply lime in bulk, so you could get, say, some 500lb bags loaded into a truck or delivered, to scoop into your spread for now?

[PonyRiderMom]

Hmm, that I don’t know. I will probably look into it more in the spring. We’re into the rainy season now so it’s too late for a big project like that.