What to do with the spring flush, paddock by paddock

Late September, and the paddocks around Whittlesea and the ranges are doing the one thing they only do properly once a year. The soil has warmed, there is still moisture underneath from winter, and pasture is growing faster now than it will at any other point in the season. For a few weeks the block gets away from you in the good way.

What you do with that growth, or do not do, sets up the next six months. It decides how much feed you get out of a paddock, how much coarse stem and seed head you are looking at in November, and how much material is standing there when the grass cures. So it is worth understanding what is actually happening out there before you decide.

Why the flush comes, and why it ends

Through winter, pasture ticks along slowly. Cold soil and short days keep growth to a crawl, which is why a paddock can look much the same in July as it did in June. Once the soil warms and the days lengthen, those same plants put on leaf quickly, and for a short run the paddock produces more feed than at any other time of year.

That run has a use-by date built into it. Warmth and day length also trigger the switch from vegetative growth, which is leaf, to reproductive growth, which is stem and seed head. Once a grass plant sends up a head, it stops putting its energy into leaf. The sward goes tall, stemmy and fibrous, stock pick at it rather than eat it, and the taller growth shades out the clover and the finer species sitting underneath.

So the spring flush is not one long green run. It is a window of good leafy feed, followed by a paddock of standing stem if nothing intervenes. There are three sensible things you can do about it: graze it, top it, or shut it up and cut it.

Keep it eaten

The simplest answer, if you have the stock to do it. The catch on most lifestyle blocks is that a mob which sits comfortably through the dry months cannot keep up with spring. The grass grows past them, they graze the young palatable patches harder and harder, and the rest heads off regardless.

Being honest about that now matters. If your stock are clearly losing the race, you are choosing one of the other two options by default, so you may as well choose it deliberately. And if you do have the numbers, spring is the time to use them well: concentrate stock so a paddock gets grazed down properly and is then spelled, rather than letting them wander the whole block and pick at the best of it.

Top it

Topping is slashing done for the pasture rather than for tidiness. The point is to take the seed heads and the rank growth off so the plants go back to making leaf, and to even up a paddock where stock have grazed some patches hard and refused others.

Height is the part people get wrong. For pasture topping the deck sits at roughly 10 to 15 centimetres: low enough to take the heads and the rank stuff off, high enough to leave a stubble that recovers quickly. Scalping to bare dirt sets the paddock back and opens the door for the next round of weeds. The cut material is not collected. It stays where it falls, as a light scatter over the stubble.

Topping in spring is also the last cheap chance at the thistles that came through winter. Slash them before they flower and you stop that generation setting seed. Leave them and you have carted the problem into next year.

Two habits worth knowing, whoever is doing the job. Walk the paddock first for hidden logs, star pickets and loose wire, because slasher blades find all of them. And blow the deck down afterwards, so weed seed is not carted from one block to the next.

Topping is not the fire-season cut. One is done to keep the grass growing. The other waits until it has stopped.

Or shut it up and cut it

If a paddock has real bulk in it, and you would rather have the feed in a shed than under stock, hay is the other door. This is the month that decision gets made. Shutting a paddock up means taking the stock off and letting it grow out, and you cannot make that call retrospectively in November.

Once the crop is ready the job runs in a set sequence: mow, let it wilt, rake it into windrows, then bale. Round bales in net wrap are the standard on small farms, though small squares still get made for horse clients. Then it is carted and stacked, under cover or at least on high ground.

Go in with your eyes open on two things. Hay needs a run of settled weather to cure, so the cutting date is set by the forecast as much as the calendar. And every bale carted off takes nutrient with it. A paddock cut year after year with nothing going back gets tired, which is how a good hay paddock quietly turns into a renovation job.

The part that shows up in summer

There is one more reason to have a view on the flush. Whatever is standing out there in October is what cures into the grass you will be looking at in January. The fire work itself waits for the cure, because slashing green growing grass in spring only means slashing it again. But how much there will be to cut is being decided right now, by whether the paddock gets grazed, topped, or shut up and carted off as bales. It is plain, predictable arithmetic, and it is easier to sort in spring than in the heat of December. How we approach that side of it is set out on the fire prevention page.

Walk it, paddock by paddock

Few blocks get one answer. The house paddock might want topping, the back paddock might be carrying enough for a cut, and the steep gully country might be grazed and left alone. Walk the block this week and put each paddock into one of the three columns: grazed, topped, or shut up. Note which ones have thistles coming through, and which have already gone stemmy.

That short list is worth more than any general rule about spring, because it is about your ground and not someone else's. If you would like a straight read on which paddock belongs in which column, that is part of what we do around Whittlesea and the ranges.

Oak Ridge Agriculture

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