How essential is it to rest a paddock?

[awinawin]

We have one pony in a paddock (two other horses in another paddock next door for company - not ours). He's a lovely robust New Forest. We poo pick pretty regularly and he is wormed regularly. How important is it to move him for a few weeks to let the paddock rest? Old lady who lives next to paddock says that we must do this, but I am struggling to find another paddock within walking distance (dd1 goes every day twice a day by herself).

It's always a good idea to rest it but if you can't, you can't. Is it big enough for you to section some off with electric fencing? We find that this time of year we are still feeding hay anyway so it doesn't matter too much if they are restricted to a smaller space for a while, and the remainder of the paddock gets the chance to recover and grow a bit.

It would be best to give it a rest, but otherwise as well as your poo picking make sure any weeds are controlled and look into fertiliser, although you'd need to check whether the pony should be removed for that.....

Split the paddock into two (or more) sections, then rotate. You can then Fertilise/weed kill/harrow the bit you aren't using. If you had three or four sections, they will have a nice rest between uses.

We don't really rest ours. We have two - one for October to May and the other for the Summer. We divide the Winter one in half to give us two seasons and the Summer one we strip graze to make sure they eat everything.

We've just had the Winter one harrowed and fertilised and, although they are back on it after a couple of days in, we'll get them off in the next few weeks when warm enough to live out.