Now that Spring has really kicked into full action here in Maryland, the pastures are full and lush. We have lots of long grass, tons of clover, and a few other things that I’ve had to look out for and manage.
One of the things I look out for is the bad types of grasses in my horses’ pasture.
Invasive grasses such as cheatgrass, foxtail, and hare barley are dangerous to your horses’ health because their barbed seed heads can work their way into your horses’ ears, teeth, and skin. When doing so they can cause your horse pain, infections, and even abscesses.
However, controlling weeds like these can be difficult in a grass pasture because any herbicide that controls these weeds can also damage the rest of the good pasture grass. So, what do you do if you find these?
The first thing you need to do is identify the harmful grasses in your pasture. Here are three things to watch out for… Cheatgrass, Foxtail, and Hare Barley grasses. All three of these have a feathery, barbed type of head. So they are pretty easy to spot.
Here are pictures of each and how to identify each one.
- Cheatgrass:
Cheatgrass grows from 6 to 24 inches tall. When they first start to show up, the leaves are brownish-green. Full-grown plants are reddish-brown in color and have tall and slender stems. The leaf sheaths are flat and the twisting blades are covered with soft feathery-like hair.
- Foxtail:
Foxtail grass looks like their name. Their “foxtail” is a bushy group of spiked seeds that resemble the tail of a fox when green. However when fully grown these bushy-looking tails quickly become hard and almost needle-like when the grass dries. These spiked seeds are barbed and are harmful to your horse.
- Hare Barley:
Hare Barley grass also grows long and straight like the other two types of grass but is about 8 inches long. Sometimes they will be bent at the base. The stems are round in cross-sections, the leaves are flat, and the buds are rolled and usually covered with short feathery hairs.
These three types of grass can also show up in large round bales of hay. There have been a few times that I’ve had to pull these harmful grasses out of my horses’ round bale when placed in the pasture.
So, don’t just assume that since you’ve purchased a round bale of hay to put in the pasture for your horse, it is free of harmful grasses. These grasses can easily pop up in a large field of good hay and accidentally be bailed together.
Ok, so now that you’ve identified these bad grasses, how do you get rid of them?
Basically, pasture management, proper grazing, and applying the proper soil nutrients are your best tools for controlling these bad grasses.
You want to try to get the good grasses to grow and get as thick as possible so there is no place for the nasty grasses to grow. These three types of bad grasses usually start to grow in a pasture when there are bare spots either from overgrazing or areas downtrodden by horse hooves.
Managing overgrazing can be done by only putting an appropriate number of horses per pasture and by swapping out pastures to allow the good grass to grow back. It’s okay to have a horse graze pasture grass down to a few inches, but you’ll want to switch them into another pasture allowing the first one to regrow the good grasses.
When there are bare patches, weeds, and bad grasses are more likely to grow in these spots. But when you have a root system of good grasses, when the sun hits these, they grow thicker and fill out the pasture properly.
One of my favorite tricks to grow really good grass that is thick and green is to seed every fall. I will go in and throw a mix of white clover and fescue grass into the pasture every year. I will use the pile of horse manure I’ve been saving for fertilizer and till it into the soil in the fall. Then I spread the seed and cover it with straw and wait.
Come spring, my grass is gorgeous, thick, and healthy for my horse to eat all season. And because the good grasses grow so well, they keep the bad grasses out. I love how nature works when you let it do its thing.
You can also manage the growth of good grasses and the elimination of bad grasses through soil fertility and PH maintenance. But that is too much “into the weeds” for me to get into in this blog. But there are lots of good references to take you that route if you need to start a pasture from scratch or totally redo an old one.
I also won’t get into herbicides in this blog either as I really don’t like to use them. I would prefer to redo an entire pasture and start from scratch than use harmful herbicides that can kill so many other species of animals and good bugs that live in the pasture too.
Nature works so well when you work with it and help your pasture develop properly.
Stay tuned for next week with a follow-up about the benefits of pastures and why your horse needs them.
Until next week, have a great weekend, and Happy Horses!