I think it is important to have this Permaculture Pastures discussion!!! Thanks for starting this thread....and hello Deb Berman! I hope you are well, and your workshop sounds wonderful, I'd love to attend! My farm is located 35 miles NE of Bozeman, MT. I've got 20 acres of overgrazed zero fertility (no soil OM, no nitrogen) rangeland...and our elevation is high, and growing season painfully short...so, for my farm, the best bet for long term sustainability and soil building I'm thinking is a combination of the right plants, adapted to our conditions, and the services of animals (trampling, manuring, among the other abundant yields). I think developing an amazing mix of species of plants in the perennial pasture is paramount. I started experimenting with pasture seeding and various pasture species in 2008, the first season on the land. Since, I've come up with a seed mix that combines the best plants that I've worked with so far, but I know it can be improved upon. It has 17 species. I'd like to see a dozen more species in the mix, and I'm looking for ideas. I'm also curious to know if there are particular reference texts or articles that experienced broadscale restoration people (Deb Berman, Owen Hablutzel, Neil Bertrando ?) have used when deciding to re-seed a degraded, low-rainfall, cold climate area to research and select plant species? What plants (grasses, particularly)used in these scenarios (Keyline, Holistic Management) have done particularily well, regardless of bioregion, with the least amount of post-seeding management, other than grazing?
I've gleaned things here and there from Acres USA articles over the years, and have found the following books to be extremely helpful in terms of selecting particular species for an "Herbal Ley", another term for a mixed-species perennial pasture:
Fertility Farming, and
Fertility Pastures by F. Newman Turner. Get these books, you can find them at the Acres USA website bookstore, or via Amazon. I've also observed our nearby mountain meadows for some idea of native species to include. I feel that using adapted introduced pasture species mixed with natives is my intuitive inclination. Often, in conventional landscape restorations of native prairies, the typical method is to seed a prepared area with native grasses and forbs, and then use herbicides to knock back weeds, which considering the slow development of native grass and forb seedlings, come in very heavy the first couple of years. I've found that using adapted introduced pasture species fills the niche in the first seasons that is filled by annual weeds in strictly native plantings. The natives are coming along underneath them. We also mow to knock back first flushes of annual weeds with great results, while the perennials are establishing beneath the weed canopy. The plant varieties I am seeding now are: Grasses: Indian Ricegrass, Western Wheatgrass, Bluebunch Wheatgrass, Orchardgrass, Perennial Ryegrass. Legumes: Ladino Clover, Red Clover,
Sainfoin, Birdsfoot Trefoil, Purple Prairie Clover. Other forbs: Annual Sunflower, Chicory, Small Burnet, Yellow Prairie Coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, Blue
Flax and Western Yarrow. Other varieties I am interested in are native mints, bee balms, other medicinals, but also other grasses.
I did not include Alfalfa specifically because of the release this year of GMO Alfalfa around the US. I've planted this mix all over some berms and a swale we built last year, as the understory to a fruit and berry food forest. So far so good! On the leeward and water catching side of the berms and swales, the mix is green despite the drought, though we have the fruit trees on a drip line. We did have some Sweet Clover (a plant often utilized by Newman Turner and Sepp Holzer) germinate within the planting, which we have a lot of dormant seed of in our soil, and here and there the Smooth Brome and Crested Wheatgrass is present from the soil seed bank. I'm not a fan of Smooth Brome since it is coarse and aggressive, but my goats like it. I started a thread about this seed mix under the Resources heading, and have some current photos I need to post there. I have about a 1/4 acre dryland seeded from last fall, and it is crispy. Interestingly, the Blue Flax seems to be hanging the toughest of all the plants, holding the soil at least, and hanging on to life. We mowed some Field Pennycress and Lambsquarter coming up in it earlier this spring. Some native wildflowers have started growing there, and the Crested Wheatgrass as well. Not much of the new seed mix even germinated, but now we're digging that area up to add more berms anyway.