Red,

I guess in your area where it stays wet, you have to let them dry first, but we don't have to do that here in far southcentral OK.

Here, where we are normally very dry, we dump them right on the beds and in the pathways and never have had any problem with them. They don't turn slimey and they don't harm any of the plants around them.

All our mowers have grasscatchers. Our riding mower has a triple grasscatcher that basically looks like 3 big rubbermaid trash cans connected to one another in a row. Tim can cut and cut and cut for a long, long time before he has to stop and empty that grass catcher.

One of my favorite ways to kill existing grasses (NOT bermuda, because you can't hardly kill it, but other pasture grasses) is to pile up grass clippings several inches deep on top of those areas. Because my clippings are normally dry, I have to wet them down. If I pile up clippings and wet them down every time I add more, then after a couple of months, that part of the pasture is pretty much clear and available for planting, except I have to dig out some Johnson Grass roots. Of course, since it doesn't rain here much at our house, if ever, in the summer months, I don't have a lot of grass clippings once the heat arrives.

The larger problem here in our very dry grassland is numerous grass fires, which often turn into larger wildfires. When then 18" of rain fell in 5 weeks this spring, I thought maybe we wouldn't have many grass fires this spring. However, the grassfires starting popping up again about 2 weeks ago, and now are happening almost daily. It just makes me sick. I don't know what's happened, but there were not many grassfires at all our first few years here....from 1999 to 2004. Since 2005, though, that's all we have. It gets old to have to worry about a grass fire burning across the surrounding pastures and getting to your and your neighbors' homes.

Some of our local VFDs are out at a grassfire right now. We sure could use some rain right now, but that's extremely unlikely here. Many people here are on the second hay cutting, and usually that's when the fires start up a little bit, but they normally worsen in July and August as the heat and dryness crank up. Unfortunately, we're already having July-type heat and dryness right now.

Our local department's fire chief (my husband) and assistant fire chief (his best friend) have watched the growth of the grasses following the earlier rains, have watched the rains cease to fall, and have watched the speed with which everything has dried up and have decided it is going to be a "bad fire year". I hope they're wrong, but am fairly sure they're right.

Here in southcentral OK, we're actually better off if we have a drier spring and a wetter summer than if we have a wetter spring and a drier summer. Either way, at whichever point the rains stop (and they do always stop), grassfires generally start 4-6 weeks later. So, if we have a drier spring but a wetter summer, we might not have grass fires until latest summer or early autumn. But, if we have a wet spring and then a dry summer, the grass fires are usually a pretty serious issue by July. This looks to be bad year.

I'm going to cut the lawn area around the house today and collect the grass clippings to add to the corn bed. That way, when the raccoons are in the garden 'stealing' corn, they can walk on a nice cushy bed of grass clippings.

Dawn

Hmm Dawn...
I wonder if "seasoning" the coons corn treats with powdered Cayenne would help? I tried that last year with the bazillions of muskmelons that were growing that I'd planted on the ranch where I worked. Quite a few were having a chunk or two eaten out of them and then just left. Don't know if it was turtles or rats, but they sure ruined a lot of gorgeous melons.

The Cayenne did seem to help, at least til it rained. Just a thought.

On the grass fires, I wonder if the chemical fertilizers and or herbicides contribute in any way?

Barbara

Barbara,

So far, nothing repels the raccoons from the corn. I've tried various commercial spray-on and granular repellents and they don't work. I've tried pepper sprays. I've tried sprinkling pepper flakes.

I think the raccoons are very numerous here and very hungry. How hungry? When I bait a live trap with plastic containers filled with canned cat food, they eat all the cat food AND the container it is in. (For containers, we've used those little clear plastic tube-shaped things that Crisco blocks come in that are roughly the shape of a stick of butter.)

My best hope of beating the coons to the corn is an early planting which did not work out in this year's weather. The new corn bed for the fall garden will have an electric fence, but I'm pretty sure we'll lose all the spring corn to the raccoons. They are coming into the garden and picking and eating ears that aren't even finished pollinating yet and that haven't filled out and aren't even close to the milk stage. It's just one of those years. Last year we won the "corn war". This year, they are winning.

Dawn

I started getting clipping again from the local recreation dept. about 2 weeks ago. The first week they were fairly wet and were fermenting from being in a pile for a day. I scattered them 1-2" deep and they dried fine. Last week the clippings were drier. Sure this week with the rain they will be wetter again. I just make several thin layers over the summer and layer manure, straw, alfalfa hay as I have time and they are available. Works well for me. If you stack the fresh wet clipping deep they will stink and ferment some. If spread thin they dry well. Jay

Red, I let the clippings dry for a day or two, mainly because they are lighter and easier for me to handle. I can pile them an inch deep or two feet deep and they still dont heat. I dont have anything to pull behind my rider, I rake them onto a plastic tarp and drag them to the garden and use them for mulch. That way I only handle them one time. If I had better equipment I might do things a little differently.

Barbara, I had melon problem with a Ground Hog about 5 years age. One 22 hollow point injection cured his craving for my melons.

Larry.

Barbara,

Much of the acreage that has burned in recent years is just native pasture that is sometimes grazed and sometimes hayed and sometimes it is just fallow pastures that no one uses for anything and no one does anything with it. Sometimes it even is wildlife managment land. Sometimes it is hay pastures that are sprayed with broad-leaf herbicides, but I don't know that the sprays contribute to the fires.

Mostly, I think, it is just a case of there being too much standing dry and/or dormant (depending on the time of the year) vegetation just sitting there waiting to burn. Partly, we humans are to blame for the fires. We insist upon putting out prairie grass fires when, historically, they were allowed to burn (LOL--well, nobody could stop them anyway). When periodic prairie fires occurred, they burnt off small trash trees (like cedar) and brushy type plants and old duff/litter on the ground. Nowadays, we put out the fires and all that stuff doesn't generally burn. Then, when the prairie finally does burn, it burns like crazy and the fire is very intense because there is a huge fuel load and we have to put out those fires because people and cows and horses and buildings are threatened. Sometimes entire towns are threatened.

This past winter, when we had numerous, large recurring fires, I saw some very wild overgrown areas of our county, especially in the NW quadrant of the county, that probably hadn't burnt in 50 years. The amount of fuel load was scarey, which explains the massive fires we had. It was the general concensus among the fire chiefs and other fire fighters that it would have been in the best interest of all involved if they could have let those fires burn and take out all the fuel load and brushy undergrowth. But, with people, homes, ranch animals, power lines, oil wells, oil well tank batteries, etc. in the path of the fires, they couldn't just let them burn.

So the answer to all our grass fires would be better grassland management on a countywide and statewide basis. Is it likely to happen? No. Why? Money. Prescribed burning as a management tool is very costly to do if done correctly, and the liability issue is huge. If you are doing a prescribed burn to burn off your land and it gets out of control, you can be liable for damage done to other people's propery. That can run up into the thousands of dollars in minutes.

As far as what has changed? Our weather. Here in Love County, we are seeing what I feel are very specific weather changes. Wetter springs. (This causes lots of grass and brush to grow.) Drier summers. (This causes all the spring growth to dry up.) Throw in arsonists into the mix (an issue everywhere, but very much an issue here the last 3 years). We seem to have a few very heavy rains interspersed with very long dry periods. Take all those conditions, mix them together and you get what we have now.

I'll use Tim's years with the volunteer fire dept. as an example. I believe our local VFD was established in 2003 and they responded to a relatively small handful of fires that year. Tim joined in 2004 and they probably had 30 or 40 calls of all types (fire, accident, rescue) that year. In 2005, everything changed. The heavy flooding rains of 2004 (I remember 12" of rain in June alone) gave way to drought. We had a combination of a very, very heavy wildfire season beginning in Oct. 2005 combined with highway-construction-caused accidents and had a record year of (I think) about 100 calls. We didn't sleep much that year. In 2006, we had another bad year with the same conditions contributing to about 180 calls. We had a break in much of 2007 although we had a heavy call load during brief periods of icy weather and flooding weather, and then a relatively bad year in 2008, with 156 calls for the year.

How about 2009? We had heavy, heavy, heavy numbers of fires during the winter wildfire season. Unlike previous years, though, almost none of them were at our end of the county. Many, many of them were in the northern half of the county, and especially near and along the Love-Carter County line. This is a rugged area that tends to get less rainfall than we do most years here at the opposite end of the county. I also suspect arsonists were at work in that area. Many of these winter fires required the work of all the depts. (14 then, 15 now) in our county to get them put out and to save all the homes.

To be honest, after 2005 and 2006, I though the rainy weather would return and we'd go back to 30 or 40 or 50 fire calls a year. That didn't happen. So far, for 2009 we have either 115 or 116 calls and the year isn't halfway through. So, a "dry land" situation I thought would be more of an up-and-down ebb-and-flow situation has not turned out to be that way at all. I am not sure what it all means.

As a gardener, though, who closely watches the weather, I understand that the same weather and climate conditions that contribute to the grass fires also contribute to the trials and tribulations experienced in the garden. I think it is climate change (and I don't mean than in an enviro-wacko way) but I do not know if it is manmade climate change or just long term shifting in climatic trends. Whatever it is, it is making living and gardening in Love County increasing challenging.

People who've lived here 50 years or more (and some of them 80 years or more) tell me the weather here in our county used to be less erratic. It used to be more consistently rainy. Some of them insist they used to routinely get 48-50" of rain here almost every year. From the viewpoint of someone who's seen lots of years with 18-25" of rain here and zero years with 48-50" of rain here, that's hard to comprehend.

To get back to the original topic of this thread, though, when the rain stops here, the mowing mostly stops. You don't have to mow fields that aren't growing. So, a big change I've seen is fewer and fewer grass clippings every year, which means I have to scrounge around and find other sources for mulch, or buy bagged mulch. I used to get a lot of spoiled hay from local farmers and ranchers, but that has decreased a lot in recent years because no one has been able to raise, cut and bale enough to have any left over to spoil. They're literally feeding every bit they raise.....and having to buy supplemental hay and feed too.

Dawn