I was reading about herbivores. Large animals that graze in meadows. They typically chomp everything down, then move on. The meadow regrows; it’s adapted to that kind of treatment. In fact, grazing is supposed to stimulate side growth, otherwise known as vegetative reproduction, since it does tend to eliminate flowering parts that stick up.
I walked past our sedge meadow. No elk. No pronghorn. The only thing that grazes it is the occasional cat, not exactly a herbivore.
So, what will happen if I put on my best elk antlers, plug in the weed whip and slice everything down to gnome chest height? How will the plants respond? Do sedges react like grasses? Do elk even graze on sedges? This meadow is not pure, in any case. Some Mexican feather grass somehow got established, and there are some other grasses that came with the wind. So, which plants will thrive after grazing? The weedy grasses or the virtuous sedges?
In any case, the meadow now looks neat, almost lawn like. It’s mowed a lot higher than a lawn, and looks a bit shaggier. Still, even the most ardent lawn-obsessed control freak would probably admit that it looks green, grassy, and somewhat uniform. As good as many of the neighborhood lawns, now so weed-infested that their original grass blends have become the minority.
When we do maintenance on the meadow, we don’t really compost in the sense of hauling all the clippings to the compost heap. We just cut them, leaving them to dry and filter down to the soil, where they will eventually decompose. This maintains soil fertility, mimics natural processes and saves me the trouble of hauling a lot of cuttings from one end of the garden to the other. Elk dung would probably be better, but I’d have to drive up to Humboldt County with a bucket for that.
I just wrote what the gnome said for the caption. It sounded like Swedish.