A Thorny Situation

One of the many things we love about Little Bluestem is the openness of the land.  Unfortunately, the previous owner did not stay up with some very important maintenance.  Controlling the mesquite is extremely important as it spreads widely and quickly.  The mesquite tree puts out a long pod full of beans/seeds.  Cows like to eat these.  As cows move around their environment, they poop.  If they are eating mesquite pods/beans, they are pooping mesquite beans into a ready-made delightfully fertilized mess.  Wherever they poop, we have a new mesquite tree in the making.  So farmers must spray the trees in early summer every year.  They use a combo of diesel and a herbicide called Remi. 

 

The tree above was sprayed about 3 weeks ago.  It is dying obviously, but you can already see the number one reason we don't like these trees, the thorns.

My fingers give some perspective of the medium size thorns on this tree.  I had to turn my car around one day and was off road very briefly and got a large thorn stuck in the side wall of my tire.  There was nothing I could do but buy a new tire!

So besides spraying, what are we doing?  Well, we're pulling down the dead trees and limbs and putting them into brush piles to be burned.  Since 2010, we have sprayed every year and finally most of the trees have died and dried out enough to be pulled down.  The trees that were sprayed this year will be left to die and dry out.  Our brother, Jonathan, has asked us to send him a 10 lb bag of mesquite every month so he can use it in his Bar-B-Q.  Not happening!  He also passed on this little known bit of trivia:  if you throw a chunk of dried mesquite into a swimming pool, it will sink to the bottom.  It will not float!  It is a tough and formidable adversary to say the least!

 

 

We are lucky that we don't have that much mesquite to remove.  But it is still a lot of work to do it by hand.  We really can't use a tractor because the thorns will get into the tires.  A bulldozer would be ideal, but then what would we do once all of it was dozed and piled up for us?  At this point, the 100+ degree weather causes my brain to scream, "Be smart and pay for a dozer!"