It's never as easy as you think it will be.

Our farmer, Gary, called early Monday to let me know I should lock the horses up so he could spray for weeds and prepare the pasture for brome planting. After checking the field and spraying he determined it was dry enough for planting and we agreed on the amount of seed I should run and purchase while he picked up his driller. Well several hours later Gary realized that the super fluffy, light, seed wasn't falling into the drilling tubes. He suggested I ride on the driller and circulate the seed with my hand to help it fall. Two hrs later we realized it wasn't working. We called it a day and then the afternoon was spent finding out that you need a special brome/native grass planter, which the counties will normally rent out. No such luck for us though, one county had switched to grass and wouldn't allow brome to be planted and the other one had theirs already rented out. So I called the big John Deere outfit and just asked if they'd rent one - it never hurts to ask. They wouldn't but the guy told me you can mix 50/50 oats with the brome and the weight of the oats will bring it down. I quickly called Gary and pulled all the oats out of the barn to our staging area. The following afternoon we had nearly 10 acres of a wonderful oat crop planted, with brome coming in after it.

A week later the oats are coming up! Isn't that cool? In July we'll be able to put the horses out for an afternoon or two and they'll clear out most of the oats but leave the brome as long as it's a short turnout. The come spring, we should have a lovely brome pasture -- with a little oats in it for a treat.