Leaf my trees alone, grass!

Help, the trees are being eaten by the grass! When we bought our little homestead, it came complete with a small herd of alpacas to keep the grass down in our back paddocks. I now see why. We’re a month away from getting our small flock of edible sheep and the grass has just exploded. At first it was just wildflowers all over the place which was lovely to look at but now our trees are being swallowed whole by the grasses. The fruit bushes have long since disappeared so I’ll be moving them down to the kitchen garden when it’s ready and the motor of our newly serviced ride-on mower has given up and blown a fan belt (or something equally expensive) when we tried to mow the paddocks. In short, the situation is dire. When we planted the trees in our little orchard, we mulched them with bark chippings which have maintained a bare patch just above the rootballs but we thought we’d help them out further by placing coir mats around the trunks of the fruit trees. With great difficulty, we waded through thigh deep grasses trying not to think about ticks, and cut the grass short around each tree and capped it with a mat that should stop anything growing directly above the rootballs. We’re currently trying to convince on of our neighbours to come over and mow it all using a tractor and then we’ll have to keep it down going forward. I’m actually unconvinced that even sheep could make a dent in this grass, but I suppose we can but try…

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