August 26, 2022
When my parents decided to build a house on the land my mom grew up on, my grandmother sent a note to the rest of her children saying, “If no-one objects, Hope and Jack will be building their home in the field between the brook and the cedars.”
The field had been a cow pasture and only the cedar trees survived the cows’ constant grazing. No one objected and my parents built a home there and soon filled it with 5 children. That clearly was more than enough livestock for my dad, so the cows never returned, and the field stopped being grazed.
Where he mowed twice a year, it remained an open field, but the rougher areas that couldn’t be mowed, immediately became a battle ground for invasives. At first it was the bittersweet and honeysuckle, later came barberry and multiflora rose. He spent much of his free time maintaining it all by hand, trying to stay ahead of the ever-encroaching vines, brush, and brambles.
He used a walk-behind sickle bar, brush cutter, chainsaw, mattock, and clippers. When we got older, he paid us to dig the roots out, but it never worked. Pieces of roots were invariably left behind and the plants always came back in the spring with a vengeance. It was, at best, a losing battle. Each year, as he got a little older, he cleared a little less and at some point, he just gave up. After that, the old cow pasture quickly became an impenetrable thicket of brush.
Our pigs and sheep, though, have happily reclaimed it all. They loved grazing the open field with its thick stand of grass and clover but each summer we gave them an additional 10-foot strip of invasive brush to clear, in an effort to push back the unruly frontier. The sheep repeatedly grazed the tops of the invasives, and the pigs attacked the roots, trying to get at the corn we’d purposefully scatter on the ground.
This year they finished their last 10-foot strip along the fence and the invasives have finally been banished to the other side of the property line. As the bare ground gives way to grass, the pasture is beginning to look the way it did before the cows left, I only wish my dad was still around to see it.