Re: Is blue grass dead

Posted by Hal/Eastern WA on August 04, 2012 at 11:32:47 from (97.114.119.195):

In Reply to: Is blue grass dead posted by Sandy B Ia on August 04, 2012 at 06:12:55:

If it is well established sod, it should come back just fine when the moisture conditions are better.

I live in an area where bluegrass seed is one of the major crops. Although there might be places where bluegrass seed is produced using irrigation, all of our local fields are done dryland style. And this time of year, we get very little moisture, and there probably won"t be much until the last part of September.

The local bluegrass fields have been swathed, then combined, and the straw has been baled and hauled away. The remaining sod is almost completely brown and dormant. It will turn green again when the Fall rains come.

Bluegrass seed used to be one of the best crops for this area, since it did not require retilling and reseeding the soil every year like wheat does. Bluegrass is especially good for the steep hills of the Palouse country, since the established sod almost completely eliminates soil erosion, which is a real problem otherwise.

But efficient bluegrass seed production requires that the plants be shocked by running a fire over the dormant or nearly dormant sod. The fire also does several other beneficial things: it removes and recycles the nutrients in the straw; it kills many of the weed seeds and bugs in the field, making it possible to use smaller amounts of farm chemicals; and it gets the field ready for the next year"s crop. But the main benefit is that shocking the plants causes them to produce MUCH more seed, which is the object of farming the bluegrass.

Unfortunately burning the fields produces some smoke, which some people find objectionable. Although most of the visible plumes from burning grass fields was nothing more than steam (the columns were pure white), some years ago the State of Washington Health Department prohibited burning bluegrass fields.

After that, our Washington farmers found them at a competitive disadvantage growing bluegrass seed. Without the ability to shock the plants, the plants produced far less seed per acre, and the straw still needed to be dealt with somehow. The farmers started baling the straw, and at first just filled most of the coulees with the big bales. They tried to sell strawboard, but it was not a sales success. And now I see semis carrying huge loads of the big bales headed out of the area, probably to feedlots somewhere. But dealing with the straw, having to buy and apply lots more chemicals and much lower yields has made bluegrass farming less attractive. And with the price of wheat lots better than it used to be, many acres that used to be bluegrass are now planted in wheat.

Across the border in Idaho, at least on the Indian Reservation, burning bluegrass is still allowed. Some of the larger farms in the area have property in both states. So there is a lot of bluegrass being grown in North Idaho, and I have heard that those farmers are doing fine over there. Not nearly as good in Washington. I think it is a real bummer! This is FARM country!

I can"t change it. It is just another example of the socialistic direction this Country seems to be going. I hate to see our freedoms eroded.

I have a large, mostly bluegrass lawn. This time of year, if I don"t water the lawn every 4 or5 days, it starts to get brown. If I don"t water an area, it will go dormant in about 2 weeks, and unless I water that area heavily every other day for several weeks, the grass will not green up again until the rains come in the Fall and the temperatures get lots cooler than the 80" and 90"s we have in July, August and early September. That is just the way bluegrass works, at least here.

If you have a decently established bluegrass pasture, I wouldn"t worry too much about it. I know there is a drought in the midwest going on, but almost certainly moisture will show up sometime. And when it does and when the weather gets cooler, your bluegrass will probably come out of dormancy and get green again. That is how it always has happened here...Good luck and pray for rain!

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