A Perfect Plan

There’s nothing in this world that makes me happier than when one of my perfect plans works out perfectly. Ok, maybe that’s going a bit overboard. It’d be stupid to rank a perfect plan above say – watching my children being born or getting married to my wonderful wife Leslie (points scored and noted). But you get the picture right? A perfectly executed perfect plan is truly an awesome sight to behold.

Case in point.

We have a little 5-acre pasture here on the Rusty Rail Ranch that shoulda-woulda-coulda been a great turnout area for my wife’s horses and mini-donkeys. One problem though – the guy that owned this place before us committed the cardinal sin of Texas land management – he stripped it of all native grasses and wildflowers, and never quite got around to planting anything. That created a BIG problem.

You see God designed this here little planet earth with a perfect soil and water conservation plan. When given nothing to nourish and grow, nature covers the bare soil with a lush carpet of weeds. It’s not a pretty plan, but it does work.

All of us know what happens if we don’t kill, pull or otherwise dispose of weeds– they spread like lice in a kindergarten class. Here on the ranch the last thing that we wanted was for our beautiful 9-acre native pasture (just across the driveway from the ugly one) to be infested with the dreaded weed bug. But beautifying a pasture is not cheap, and of course I am the cheapest, which left us in a major predicament.

Luckily for us, we found a solution hanging right up there on the feed store bulletin board…a government soil and water conservation plan workshop. At the workshop we learned that as agricultural landowners we had the opportunity to participate in an Environmental Quality Program (EQIP) offered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service branch of the USDA. Since it is a federally funded program you just gotta know that it’s gonna get pretty complicated – and it does.

In a nutshell, the government said that they would pay for a portion of the funds needed to establish a forage crop (hay) on our land, and manage the crop’s nutrients and pest population for two years. They would also share the cost of putting up fences for grazing rotation and running waterlines for the animals.

Hmmm…free money to improve our property and I get to run my tractor?…Yep, we’re all over it!

Here in Texas, bermudagrass (yeah that’s one word) hay is the main staple of all things cow, equine, goat and such, so as with anything else that I look into, I hit the Internet to learn everything possible about establishing a good pasture brimming with high-quality hay so that I could make millions in future hay revenue. Ok, maybe we could just save a few bucks by growing hay to feed our own animals. But that would still be a good thing, right?

So after much too much information overloading of my already overburdened brain I decided to plant Sungrazer blended bermudagrass seed. Planting bermudagrass seed as opposed to sprigging (planting live plant parts) requires a bit of planning, but for us it was the only option since I could do the entire job without outside help. Unlike sprigging which is more forgiving, seeding requires that you have all of your ducks in a row so that you’re ready for the perfect combination of season, temperature and rainfall that can often be a very small window of opportunity. For us, that meant starting the pre-planting process in early February to prepare a good seedbed for planting in mid-April.

First we took soil samples around the pasture and sent them off to the Texas A&M Soil, Water, and Forage Testing Laboratory so that they could give us the specs on the best nutrients to apply. Then we chisel-plowed the pasture a few times in several different directions to loosen up the soil, taking advantage of every little bit of moisture available (including fog). The plowing continued through the Texas March ‘green-up’, when spring begins to show her face and things start to sprout (weeds in our case).

Of course, I had to have all of the assorted stuff that is required to do it by the book, so as with everything else that I do – I purchased the very best implements available. Nah…you know me better than that, now don’tcha?

Truth is, is that in addition to what I already had, I would need a broadcast seeder-spreader to distribute the seed evenly, something to lightly cover the seeds about ¼” deep, and a cultipacker (heavy roller) to firm-up the seed bed. My local feed-n-seed store agreed to provide the seeder for free along with the seed purchase, but what about a cultipacker and a thingy to cover the seed? Ah, let’s go check it out on the Internet!

I found used chain-harrows (thingy’s) to cover the seed and cultipackers galore, problem was that they were all in other states. I found chain-harrows for less than $300, but cultipacker prices ranged from $650 - $6,500 ! Hmm…there’s got to be a better (cheaper) way… Ah what’s this? A drawing on how to construct a cultipacker? Well thank you LSU ag department! Nice design and all, but I’d still have to purchase about $300+ in tubing, pipe and concrete to fill it. Still too rich for my blood, and after all, I’m McGyver right?

The old saying ‘Good things come to those who wait’ must have been written for me, because I procrastinate on everything, and sometimes ‘good things’ just kinda pop-up out of nowhere when I’m down to the wire and just gotta have ‘em. Like the cultipacker – or should I say – gonna be a cultipacker.

I found an old cattle-rub contraption, used in the old days to coat the backs of cattle with a mixture of diesel fuel and hydraulic oil to keep the bugs at bay. Kinda makes me hungry for steak just thinking about it, how about you? The cattle-rub consisted of a 7½-foot long steel tube covered with expanded metal, held at a 45-degree angle by a bolted-together assortment of 2½-inch tubing. All this and still full of the diesel / hydraulic mix for only $150 ? Wow, what a deal!

I bought it (of course), took it out behind the barn with LSU’s drawing in hand – starred at it awhile…and low-and-behold - a cheap and effective plan started to come together in the back of my head. A cut here…a weld or two on the Texas-tea-saturated tubing there…bolt this on…and waa-laa (that’s Texas lingo)…a cultipacker is born!

Yep, my only additional purchase was for $13 worth of heavy tubing for a drawbar and a piece of plate steel strong enough to use as a hitch plate. I filled her full of a concoction of rocks and concrete from broken open, chunky bags that I didn’t know what to do with anyway - shoved in some rusty rebar that I kept on tripping over in the grass behind the barn - and then bolted on some old chain onto the front of it for a makeshift chain harrow thingy. I bolted the chain on instead of welding it just in case I need it to pull some unlucky Jeeper out of our pond someday.

So for a total of $163 – not including the moisture contaminated welding rod that I was going to throw away anyway (someday never), I am now the proud owner of a cultipacker, chain harrow thingy. Plus, I now have an extra ten-or-so gallons of diesel / hydraulic fluid mixture on hand for whatever…Pretty sweet deal right?

So you might think that that is my perfect plan coming together story, huh? Nope…it gets better.

Remember that window of opportunity? Well, I kept checking the long-term weather forecast for a chance of rain sometime after April 15th, which is the date that my feed-n-seed guy told me would be the safest bet for the required 60 degree minimum soil temperature. On the 17th, the forecast called for a 60% chance of rain or thunderstorms for the 20th followed by a few more days of possible rain. So on April 18th I rolled the pasture with my beautiful (and functional) cultipacker chain harrow thingy, and then spread 1000 lbs. of 20-20-0 fertilizer and 50 lbs. of Sungrazer Bermudagrass seed on the pasture.

Since I just spent $600 on fertilizer and seed, and was now totally dependent on the fickleness of the weather, I did the only thing I could think of…I prayed.

I prayed, my wife prayed, my kids prayed, we all prayed for rain. We had our neighbors pray for rain, my thirteen-year old had her friends at school pray for rain, my 6-year old had her teacher pray for rain (yeah you read it right…a teacher…at a public school). So guess what happened?

It rained…glorious, wonderful rain – bursting forth from the heavens like life-giving milk to a baby. And cry like a baby I did (Ok, not really, but it could happen).

So my perfect plan came together…well…perfectly. We got our pasture planted just in time for rain. Perfect timing, a perfect plan, and it’s made me pretty happy too. Doesn’t take much, does it? Anyway, so now I have to try to remain patient for a couple of weeks to see my little green niblets spring forth from the ground, which will in turn help feed my wife’s horses and mini-donkeys. We have to wait about a year to let the animals graze on it, but we should be able to bale our bermudagrass hay this summer, and if the weather provides, bale more than once.

Hmm…I could do that. All I would need would be some kind of thingy to gather the hay into rows and then of course, a hay bailer.

Maybe I could build one, or even better...both of 'em. Oh well...I’d better start gathering some stuff and come up with a plan…I sure hope it’s a perfect one!

The Captain <><