PASTURE FROM SWAMP

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 79, Issue 7103, 5 September 1949, Page 7

PASTURE FROM SWAMP

RANGIORA FARMER’S EXPERIENCES A farmer near Rangiora who has recently drained a swamp paddock and_established good grass on it, has been surprised at the long life dock seed appears to have in the ground. The swampy patch has never been anything but swamp as far as he knows, and has certainly been under water for very many years. Docks have appeared thickly all over the lower-lying parts of the paddock, and might well have been expected to do so, but it is harder to explain their appearance on pieces of ground which, in levelling the paddock, were bulldozed off to a depth of up to two feet. Hormone weedicides fortunately are extremely efficient on docks. This paddock, incidentally, raises the question that there must be a very big area of potentially useful land in the aggregate in small corners of farms throughout the country. Some ingenuity was required to drain this one, but the hard work was all done at very reasonable cost with a dragline to put in the open drains, a bulldozer to do what levelling was necessary, and heavy discs behind a crawler tractor to do the cultivation. A piece of stagnant water and niggerheads has been turned into 10 acres or so of heavy dairying land, which is carrying already a magnificent pasture although it was sown only in March. There are some light shingly patches in the paddock, so the mixture used was subterranean clover, Timothy, Italian ryegrass, and pferennial ryegrass, with the idea of establishing Timothy on the heavier parts, and relying on the subterranean clover to take care of the lighter patches. The ground was naturally very sour, but it has had 34 tons of lime and 3 cwt of super, which should overcome any deficiency resulting from a long immersion in water.