Disking Cattails

[rusty6]

Cattails, or bulrushes as they are often known here, grow really tall in the sloughs in the fields here. Sloughs have dried up some this fall and I can get in with the Massey 360 disker and work them up. Tremendous tall crop but the old disker knocked it down and turned up a little dirt. 2090 Case running without duals is risky in jobs like this but I didn't want to install the duals for just a day's work. Some video of it here. Almost like a snow storm when those cattails burst open.

Disking

 

[tim s]

Here in Ohio they would put you in Jail for busting Cat tails...If cat tails showed up on an old fly-over map you would need to plant around that area...more crazy rules..

 

[Pete-IN]

About the same situation in Indiana Tim.

 

[fastfarmall]

Why are they protected so they can spread lint all over ??

 

[cjunrau]

around here we would cut and bale it and use it for bedding.

 

[1970-1655]

CornDog field! Where did you think those corndogs come from?

Here in Indiana, a place like that can be declared a Wetland because it may contain some unknown almost extinct species of something. People mow them down or disc them and try to farm that. Indiana Department of Environmental Management gets upset when this takes place and they learn about it.

 

[rusty6]

(quoted from post at 06:27:49 10/16/23)
Here in Indiana, a place like that can be declared a Wetland because it may contain some unknown almost extinct species of something. People mow them down or disc them and try to farm that. Indiana Department of Environmental Management gets upset when this takes place and they learn about it.

I have to say I'm a little shocked at how tough the rules are on you guys down South when it comes to controlling a few weeds on your own land. Lots of them go up in smoke here every fall.

 

[BarnyardEngineering]

(quoted from post at 03:56:01 10/16/23) Here in Ohio they would put you in Jail for busting Cat tails...If cat tails showed up on an old fly-over map you would need to plant around that area...more crazy rules..

Same here in NY.

 

[Leroy]

All I ever see them is in roadside ditchers. Ohio.

 

[thehickdaddy]

Same in oregon

 

[ss55]

Why go through all that effort if it is for all practical purposes permanent wetland? The next normal year any crop planted on it will drown out and any fertilizers and pesticides applied to that ground will likely go straight into the ground water.

In the US you can drain wet land so long as you replace it with the same area of wetland somewhere else on the same property.

 

[Den N Ms]

After disking all of them cattail seeds in you will wave a bumper crop next year.

 

[rusty6]

(quoted from post at 07:16:46 10/17/23) Why go through all that effort if it is for all practical purposes permanent wetland? The next normal year any crop planted on it will drown out and any fertilizers and pesticides applied to that ground will likely go straight into the ground water.

Its not a lot of work and I enjoy it. I only do a small fraction of the sloughs that cover our land knowing full well that I likely won't seed them. It keeps the willows from coming back plus it will not catch six foot high drifts of snow over winter which would only add more water to the slough.

 

[showcrop]

Here in NH, there is nothing wrong with tilling cattails under. The problem is that they don't want you farming wetlands, so cattails are just an indicator. I was planning to till an area that had cat tails so I called the Soil Conservation office. They sent Sue, the cattail lady over, and she looked at what I was doing and told me no problem. The overarching concern is avoiding water pollution, and the rules were established in 1972 with passage of the Clean Water Act. Rusty's sloughs probably have minimal water flowing out of them so if he were in the US it would probably be OK.

 

[rusty6]

(quoted from post at 09:31:45 10/17/23)
Rusty's sloughs probably have minimal water flowing out of them so if he were in the US it would probably be OK.

You are right that these sloughs don't flow at all unless they are filled to overflowing and then they do join up with the next slough on lower land. If enough of them join up they will eventually reach the creek and flow into the Qu'appelle system. We had that a few years in the past decade but are back to normal now.