Paddock Maintenance...what and why?...

[Honeypots]

What do you do to maintain your paddocks/turnout areas? and why do you do it? Do you prefer your paddocks to look a certain way? ie like a lawn/au naturel? Do you spray weeds, fertilize etc?

Was looking at my paddock at home which is approx an acre. It looks like a quagmire..always does at this time of year but always come back green. It has patches of stingers/weeds/and rough 'wee' areas. Its not the tidiest of fields but I don't mind. Its not my lawn its an area for the ponies to live in. They scoff the stingers at the end of the year and nibble at the bushes and trees and seem to do really well on it with no hard feed and just top up hay in winter.
Do people prefer to keep their fields nice rather than turn their horses out and if so why is that?..

 

[irishdraught]

We like to keep our land free of weeds and spot spray the docks and thistles. There was also a lot of ragwort rearing it's head last year due to a lot of neglected land nearby that was bought with a farm by a developer a few years ago - leaving the land to go to rack & ruin.

Our horses stay out full time during the summer so get their feed from the grass. We are lucky that we have enough to be able to rotate into summer / winter & hay paddocks. I think it is a horses best interests for the grass not to get horse sick.

 

[madhector]

Our paddocks are purely somewhere to let the horses out, not really used as a sorce of grazing as I have far to many horses for the amount of grazing I have. So I feed hay all year round and rarely have much grass left! Horses are out either all night or all day a dont have enough stables for all of them either, so have to rotate. The two youngsters are the only ones out 24/7 on good grass as they need it. Makes life quite hard work as constantly poo picking or mucking out, but its my own fault for having too many horses! (another one arriving next week too

)

To answer you question, I get rid of the nettles and anything nasty, but dont worry about thistles etc, fields get fertilized, and bare parts re-sown.

 

[Magicmillbrook]

I only have three acres for 3/4 horses. I have it divided up into 6 1/2 acres paddocks so can rest parts. I roll the winter 'trash' paddock and any gate ways that are poached before being rested (using an old heavy garden roller). I have ever reseeded using barn sweepings.

I tend to spot spray for ragwort, and docks. Nettles and thistles just get pulled up, I leave the nettles on the ground for them to eat up. I have never fertilised, but have spread well rotted muck (two years old) back onto resting pasture in the autumn. I would only recomend spreading muck back onto land if you know their worm count for your horses is low and the muck has heated up well and is now very well rotted.

I dont like to spray too much as you loose the beneficial weeds and herbs. I dont want too lush a pasture as three of mine are good doers!

 

[angiebaby]

Don't do anything with mine, I have 3 ponies and 1 horse on 6 acres. They have 1 - 1 and a half acres for April to October and the rest for winter which gets topped a couple of times during the summer. They live out 24/7 only coming in in very bad weather, I only use half a dozen bales of hay a month, Never had any ragwort, just weeds, which all mine eat anyway.

 

[Baggybreeches]

I only have a small paddock, so mine are turned out in the menage over the winter, it means they can have some good grass through the summer, but I do feed hay all year round.
Yesterday I installed some gateguard (the plastic mesh grids) I usually let them out on the grass when we have our first decent dry spell and get them off it in Sept/Oct time. I am not obsessive about the way the paddock looks but I pull weeds and poo pick nearly every day.

 

[0ldmare]

I have 6 acres for 3 horses so the fields dont get too trashed even at this time of year. I spot spray the docks, pull the ragwort and generally try to keep the paddocks in a good condition. I have just had soil samples done to see if they need anything to keep the soil good. The whole point is that I want the grazing to support 24x7 turnout from April to the end November and then turn out all day in the winter so it makes sense to look after it

 

[SpruceRI]

I pull the ragwort up religiously, we get a lot on all the paddocks, and occasionally hack at the thistles nettles and dock.

We tend to just mow these areas to make the field look nicer, but of course it doesn't kill the weed.

In one of my paddocks we had an abundance of creeping buttercups and one year I sprayed an acre by hand with a knap sack sprayer. It did kill it all off and hasn't come back in such large swathes but I was worried about putting the ponies back on the pasture even after the 2weeks they said to give it.

Last year I bought some Ragwort killer because however much I dig up the plants and every last wisp of roots, it still grows like billy-oh, so I'm going to treat paddock by paddock and rest it for a month or so and hope the weedkiller does its stuff.