How to improve grazing????

[Widget]

Last winter my field had horses in it right up to the end of February and as it is very wet land it got horrendously poached and ruined. It has had nothing on it since and has regrown with no bare patches and is waist high!!
The problem is that a) 80% of it is weeds (Docks, thistles, buttercups etc)
b) Although obviously not muddy now it has dried rutted and bumpy and is hard to walk on and liable to break a horses leg if it ran about!
Now I dont want horses on there now till next summer and wont use it in the winter again so I want to get the land nice again. Do I top it and weedkill it, just spray and dont bother topping, kill off the whole lot and re seed for grass, roll it or harrow????? I dont know a thing about grass management and will have to get a man in to do any work as I have no equipment. Money is an issue as I am paying livery for the neds so cant afford to throw money at the problem without being sure of good results.
It is a small area of 1.5 acres.
Anybody got ant advice please? :)

[Perfect Pony]

Hi, i have a book at home called 'managing grass for horses' this is a great book, cant remember who its by tho so ud have to look around, but it shows everything you would ever need to know about looking after your horse padock, it has opinions on what to do when theres problems such as yours etc, lts of advice in this book, would be worth a try!!!
hope this helps,
im lucky as i dont have this prob as i have 5 fields that dont get muddy but books like this are always usefull to us horse owners!!!
:D

[galadriel]

Mow. Mow mow and mow some more. The weeds mostly reproduce by seeds and grass by sending out runners...if you can take the top off the weeds BEFORE they seed out, then they'll die and the grass will have a chance to take back over. Cutting the grass doesn't cut down the grass population at all :)

[Sam and Blake]

yeds i agree have it topped.thats what we did with our field because it was taken over by thistles and stinging nettles.now its just grass and its taken over all the nasties.we do it every year but not ususally until later.we had to do it earlier this year because the stinging nettles were taking over :mad:

[Jessey]

I would top it first, then harrow, it will drag out any dead grass weeds allowing space for new grass to grow and also loosen the rutts alowing the field to level a bit. I would then look at something like lawn sand, its not too expensive (you can get it at most garden centers) and when we had about the same ammount of land we just applied it by hand, it kills off common weeds like clover and buttercup (probably won't work on nettles etc though) but at the same time adds a mild fertiliser to help the grass grow.

Once the weeds are under control I would look into seaweed fertiliser, you only have to put it on every few years and it is safe for horses but should really help premote the grass growth and its also not too expensive, again you could probably apply it by hand.

If your field does get poached over winter its a good plan to roll and harrow, just as the field is drying out in spring, if your leave it too late the ground is too hard and too early and the roller will just get stuck in the mud ;) but if you can level it then it will hold up much better the following year.

I have 3 horses who are on about 5 acres year round (1 field), I just fence off bits to rest the periodically through the year and it works well, I used to keep 3 on about 1.5 acres year round and that was harder, in the end we made a small paddock for winter which got totally trashed, there was not a single blade of grass on it after a while so they got hay when out and we just rolled, harrowed, re-seeded and fetilised every spring :rolleyes:

There is a really good book called 'Horsekeeping on a Small Acreage' by Cherry Hill which gives loads of good advise, I got it from Amazon and I don't think it was very expensive.

J x

[Widget]

Thanks for the advice you guys. I have a farmer coming to look at it in the next few weeks to give his opinion and then a quote for doing it for me. Depending on cost I think I will go from there. Will try to find that book too! Thanks again.