Scotch Broom

When we first moved to Traverse Creek Ranch in the beginning of this year the whole place was covered in Scotch Broom. It´s invasive plant originally from southern Europe. Now it´s a huge problem in our part of California. The county even lets you borrow equipment to take it away. Scotch Broom grows very fast and the plants can be up to 3m high. They are very beautiful when they are blooming April-June. They have yellow flowers. But they are disturbing the environment and tend to take over big areas of pastures for example. They are lightly poisonous for horses, in large amounts. They have deep roots and you have to take everything away to hinder them from taking over.

We have a goat pen that we move to a new area after the goats done their job.

Everything looked like this when we moved in.

We have declared war on the Scotch Broom here at our ranch and it´s a tough war! Our allies are goats. Goats love to eat the plant and they are chewing on the bark, which kills it. We only have a few goats right now but are planning to get many more. To completely wipe out the Scotch Broom on pastures we have to use a tractor as well. Making and keeping the pastures nice for the horses is one of our major priorities when it comes to spending time working on the ranch.

It makes us much more happy to see our organic strawberries grow like weed in our garden :D I tasted the first ones today and they are delicious!