How Does One Build a Living Seedbank?

I’ve been dancing around this question in bits and pieces for a couple years now, and devoted a post to defining what I was hoping to accomplish by developing a living seedbank two years ago. Still, as both my aspirations and the restorations themselves evolve, I think it worthwhile to put out a 2026 version of my quixotic quest, and to gather the threads I have in other posts in one place. In the original post, entitled “The Living Seed Bank”, I put out both the justification and the vision of using our prairies, both native and restored, as a repository of populations of various species grown from seed adapted to this region and climate. Whether that “region” is 20,000 square miles or 200,000 square miles I don’t claim to know; the right answer is likely different for every species. However, it is very obvious that there are zones of adaptation whose edges become barriers when one tries to establish seed that comes from outside that zone. My original attempt at a limited restoration twenty years ago included purchased purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea) seed, a species that grows all over this area. I do not know where the seed came from, but after having thousands of plants establish the first year, they quickly dwindled to a few odd plants who had found a way to live through winters here, cowering beneath the frigid wind and cold in which their brethren perished. I have several other examples. Thus, I need to be careful in the seed that will become those living plants which will be available as a source of seed for others to use. I do not foresee my land as a source to populate a large acreage by itself, but as a supplement with other seed, and as a source of “foundation seed” to increase, whether for the gatherer’s use or to sell. I have many dilemmas/barriers/obstacles that surround this quest. Thus. this post.

First, how many plants of each species do I need to be growing in my prairies to accomplish my goals? How many plants will it take to provide a self sustaining population over the long run? One hopes that such a population will also provide enough plants to provide a valuable amount of seed. There is a very influential book published in the 1960’s by E. O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur titled “The Theory of Island Biogeography” which simply states that there is a strong correlation between the size of the island, how close it is to the other landmasses and the number of species that will survive there. Our prairies are islands, even in areas with substantial acreage of native grass, because of overgrazing, herbicide use, invasive species (particularly smooth brome) and perhaps inbreeding. There are not always sources of seed that can easily travel to my prairies nearby. I am thus viewing my prairies as an island, and in effect, trying to enlarge my island for a suite of wildflower/forb species so that they remain in my prairies.

For example, I have perhaps 50 plants of standing milkvetch (Astragalus adsurgens) in two of my native prairies, and have so far been able to establish 5-10 in the restorations. How many more plants need to establish before I can relax and let natural processes take over? While again I’m sure there are widely different answers to this question depending upon species, I am going to make guesses for all the species in the seed bank and move forward. The number will be smaller for long lived species, for species which I know are in neighboring prairies, and perhaps for species with more effective modes of dispersal. Obviously, that means larger numbers for short lived species, ones for which I know of no close neighbors, and species which tend toward local seed distribution. Standing milkvetch is, I believe, long lived, but I know of no nearby sources, and it’s seed doesn’t seem to go far from the plant – it tends to grow in groups, which, as it’s not rhizomatous, are likely all from a single pioneer plant as seed source. All this lead me to feel I need to keep working to increase populations, hoping at least to get into the hundreds, to both avoid their extinction on my property, and to provide seeds to others.

A second, opposite example is wild prairie rose (Rosa arkansana) which is very long lived because it grows clonally by rhizomes, is found in many places nearby and has seemingly wonderful distribution from birds and mammals who eat the rose hips, distribute the processed seed (one finds many along roadsides next to pastures where birds have eaten rose hips and have then gone to ingest gravel for their gizzards) and thus spread them hither and yon. Though prairie rose will be available for seed gathering in my prairies, as well as for all the other ecosystem services it provides, I won’t spend much time or money to increase populations in my restorations. Each species will gets its own determination.

The second dilemma relates to the issue of inbreeding, but really goes farther than that. In my native prairies I have plants with genotypes developed over hundreds, perhaps thousands of year that have contributed to their evolutionary fitness for this piece of land – they’ve been able to pass their genes down and survive. Any beginning to a locally adapted seedbank has to begin by recognizing this fact. Seed from my plants, and likely from plants in nearby prairies, take precedence. We need them if it is possible to get that seed. However, I still have qualms I will illustrate with another example. When my friend Ben Lardy and I first spread seed on the restoration in 2018, I had gathered some seed heads of downy paintbrush (Castilleja sessiflora) from a neighboring pasture and put the seed into several batches of gathered seed that were spread. From that small beginning thousands sprang up in two separate restorations. It was a big success! Those qualms developed almost immediately, however. All the seed came from 20-30 plants growing on perhaps 3000 square feet on a single hill, very possibly from a single colonizing plant sometime in the past. Are they already inbred? If not, it seems just a matter of time before they will be, and that we will lose existing genetic diversity in those plants from genetic drift, the random happenstance inherent in small isolated populations. Put simply, I need to add diversity, even with the substantial number of plants that I have.

Almost by definition, any wildflower species that is conservative/isolated enough to warrant extra attention in the seedbank needs additional sources of seed to provide the genetic material to stave off genetic drift and inbreeding, and to hopefully provide genetics to continue retaining its evolutionary fitness in changing conditions, like warming temperatures down the road. Where do I find that variety, how much is necessary, how do I access it, and how do I get it introduced into existing restorations and native prairie? All of what I write here contains opinions and speculations so I’m really in over my head. Stick with me anyway, and we’ll pretend we know a few things, after which readers can disagree and throw brickbats as they please.

First, the easy answer. I can, and have been, gathering seed from other prairies I have access to in the area, most notably the prairies in my wife’s grazing system 30 miles east of the Central Point Prairies, as well as a friend’s small prairie close to her grazing system. These have what I see as an added benefit of occurring about 800 feet lower in elevation in a slightly warmer and wetter climate, the climate to which we seem to be changing. I have also been adding seed that Ben Lardy and another young friend, Levi Waddell, have gathered in prairies within 20-30 miles of the restoration that they have access to. So far, so good. We are getting seed that is likely to add some genetic variety. I still have two separate problems here, that lead in the same direction. I cannot source seed of every species this way. Maybe with Ben and Levi’s help I can come close, but there will be some species that are uncommon enough or just hard to gather, for which I may have to look farther afield if I wish to add diversity. Also, while I am likely adding a few genetic possibilities into the meta-genome of the various species from seed gathered nearby, is it enough? This restoration and the native prairies have perpetual easements, and I profess to be playing a very long game here, one that can be appreciated many generations down the road. How far afield should I look?

As an example I go back to my downy paintbrush. I need genetic additions to add to the depth of the greater paintbrush genome in my restoration as much here as with any species. Right now both Ben and Levi will look for some to provide me, but what if they aren’t able to do it? Do I buy seed from a vendor which may or may not be able to provide me the ultimate provenance, the wild source that the seed originally came from before it was grown in small plots for sale. Obviously, I plan to ask about that provenance, but I don’t expect that I will always get it. I have decided that, as the prairies reside about 40 miles from both North Dakota and Minnesota, I will accept seed with more vague descriptions of origins in those two states, as well as South Dakota, when I feel I need new sources. Prairie Moon is a native seed seller in the southeast corner of Minnesota from which I have bought small batches of many species in the past without questioning the source material. I will no longer do that. Prairie Moon is closer to northern Illinois than it is to my prairies. I need to become a more informed consumer. To sum up, I am definitely looking for more diversity for many species. I will try to obtain that diversity from within 50-100 miles, but I don’t think it profits me to be a purist, and when needed, may accept that the source may be 200-250 miles away. My gut feeling is that adding genetic diversity is important enough that I will roll the dice, extend my accepted circle of origin, and hope I don’t introduce characteristics that make my forb populations less fit. I am not suited to prolonged analysis, but to taking action. I will move forward.

I’m moving forward now, but to what? I can’t work on every species at once. How do I prioritize my activities? How do I prioritize which species to work on? There is no completely right answer here; as the saying goes “It’s all good.” Mostly, so far, I have spent the most time on species which for whatever reasons, are iconic to me, that inspire me. Those include black samson (Echinacea angustifolia), prairie turnip (Pediomelum esculentum), standing milkvetch, groundplum milkvetch (Astragalus angustifolia), slender milkvetch (A. flexuosus), leadplant (Amorpha canescens), prairie smoke (Geum triflorum), pasqueflower (Anemone patens) and a few others including one that I will use as an example, downy gentian (Gentiana puberulenta). First, the little gentian is drop dead gorgeous when in bloom. For 50 summers now I always hope for a good year when the base of the hills in our hayland would have a scattering of these beauties blooming. It is also a species with few enough plants, and occupying a small enough area in my prairies, that it could clearly use more friends to commune and cross pollinate with.

It has also been on the South Dakota list of threatened species. It isn’t truly rare in this area, but my land is on the western edge of its range, and that in itself makes it a good candidate for establishing a robust population. I have asked Dr. Lora Perkins and her crew for 100 seedling plugs to transplant this year and will attempt to very carefully spread my little batch of gathered seed as well. I am not doing this with black samson or leadplant because I can gather lots of seed, and have many hundreds of each already established in the restorations. I am desirous of other opinions here, but for now if a species is hard to get, I have some already in my prairies, it is very conservative (only being found in good condition native grass), and I really, really like it, I will spend extra time and resources on it. Not the most objective criteria, but as I wrote earlier, other ideas are welcome.

Finally, let’s assume I now have my new seed, sourced from wherever I thought fit. How do I best turn that into growing plants producing their own seed in the restorations and native prairies? I no longer have the blank canvas of a bare field to place the seed upon. Even the most recent restoration, 20 acres seeded in 2022, is becoming filled with plants and their thirsty roots. On the one hand, new seed must have found ways to create new plants in native prairies, otherwise all plants would rely on clonal growth and fight for space that way. Seeds count, even in existing prairies. On the other hand, how many get to grow up and be somebody? An individual plant may put out many thousands of seeds over its lifetime in order to replace itself and, God willing, maybe add a second child to the world. Can I afford to gather thousands of seeds to add a single plant? Or, to turn the question around, how do I stack the odds in my favor?

I’ve been trying to do that the past three years by planting plugs grown for me at South Dakota State University by the Native Plant Initiative (NPI). I’ve planted around 2000 small plants of 20 species or more, and have not had a lot of success. I’ve mentioned before that I think much of that has been due to my abysmal timing, with having many of the most intense planting sessions occurring just before stressful weather hit. I think I’m past placing all the blame there, however. Not all of the plants went in right before hot windy periods. Almost all of the plugs, however, went into gravelly, xeric soils. I think it’s too much to expect pampered little greenhouse seedlings to compete, however well adapted they may be, on droughty sites with established plants already there. I hope to try again to plant 200-300 plugs this year, but most will go into better soils, which should help, especially if we eliminate more of the nearby competition, trying to allow them to grow a bit before all the surrounding plants shade and their roots grow back and overwhelm the new seedlings. We will probably flag them as well, to keep better track of how they do, and perhaps to water them.

Then what of the species that are at home in gravel soils? I think we will rely more on continued spreading of seeds, probably in conjunction with burning, mowing and some grazing to hold down the competition from existing plants. I’ve discussed this in more depth in a recent post “The 2026 Plan”, but suffice to say, if I want to get to those self-sustaining populations that I and others can be gathering in the future, I cannot rely just upon population increases from the plants that are already there. As a last example, one of the species that I really want to increase is green milkweed (Asclepias viridiflora), which is at home on the most xeric soils. I probably have 100-150 of them in my native prairies and a few in the restoration which resulted from perhaps 100 plugs I planted the past three years. This year I hope to plant a few more plugs, but more diligently care for them, and also to go out there with seeds to place on/in the soil in appropriate areas, as opposed to flinging them out for the wind god to distribute. I can’t do that with tiny seeds like our little paintbrush, who need the wind god, as their seeds are like dust, but I hope to stack the odds a bit with bigger seeded species, including the green milkweed.

It appears that I have a busy year ahead of me, but it seems to me that this is a grand goal to which I put my labors. In total, Linda and I have about 750 acres of prairie, about two thirds of which is native and a third restored by us. That’s a big responsibility for two senior citizens, but we are working towards finding others to follow us. Linda concentrates on her prairies in the Whetstone Valley near the Minnesota border, managing her cow herd, and I play in my hill prairies on the Prairie Coteau. I read of retirement being boring for some, without the structure of their past workplaces. In contrast, our “retirement” includes workplaces that exist in the great expanse of sun, sky and the often harsh play of wind and rain where boredom is impossible. What a privilege to feel the power of the elements every day! What a privilege to work to attain lofty goals! One day I was having coffee with my friend, Tim Holtquist, complaining that I was a bit overwhelmed by all the tasks I had in front of me. Tim, who is 73 and still working and very active, smiled and said, “Yeah, me too; isn’t it cool?” I will stay true to that sentiment and move forward with helping my prairies become a resource for society, and maybe a beacon of hope for those who value the natural environment. That is the windmill at which I tilt, and like my role model, Don Quixote, has said, “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams – this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness – and maddest of all: to see life just as it is, and not how it should be.” These restorations are my madness as I chase what I think my land should be. I am at peace with that description. Below are some examples of my goals, beginning with downy gentian.

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Plants of Central Point Prairies 76-100

Here goes one more attempt to document what I have in my prairies. This will be the final installment of the wildflowers, the forbs and a couple shrubs that are found in the native and restored prairies on the farm where I grew up. I started it not sure if I would get to 100, with the stipulation that all the species must either be found in my native prairie or very nearby. In other words, a species that is native just east or south of here that I have purchased seed for and established in the restoration would not qualify. The gray area is those species that have a record in Day County, where the restoration resides, but that I have never seen before locally. In the end, it seems I included a couple of those, but not all. So it goes. The point of the post, however, is to document not just what is there, but my experiences around that plant, and their potential inclusion in the “seed bank” concept. Thus, I also left out a few weedy native species which will never be part of the seed bank, such as common ragweed and curlycup gumweed. There will eventually be a post specifically detailing where all these forbs, along with a few of the grasses and sedges, fit into the goal of a living seed bank for this area. In the meantime I will start with #76, and after I finish the wildflowers I will move on to the grasses for yet another post this winter. As I wrote in the last post, as I am getting to many of the less notable wildflowers, ;meaning there will be fewer pictures and stories, something that will be sporadically corrected as I get pictures next summer.

76 and 77. Wild, or Prairie Rose (Rosa arkansana) and Smooth Rose (Rosa blanda) I put both of these together not because they are similar, but because I will have little to say about smooth rose, a shrub that inhabits a couple patches along Anderson Lake, which borders my prairies and that I do not have in my restoration. It is also a common, almost weedy, shrub as you go east of here. On the other hand, as we sit almost on the western edge of its native range, maybe our biotype would serve a purpose. They both share the same two methods of natural propagation, cloning by rhizomatous growth, usually occurring in clonal patches, and by making tasty red berries, irresistible to birds, who then crap out the seeds wherever they go. It is not unusual to see them lining the roadside in areas along gravel roads where birds have gone to pick up little stones to aid their digestion. Wild Rose is a common plant in my prairies, with patches in all the remnants. It is a decreaser, however, which will disappear under heavy grazing. Cows mouths are tough enough that the little thorny stems do not seem to be an impediment. A couple times I have waited for them to ripen, only to lose an entire seed crop to grazing. I don’t know what happens to the seeds in a cow’s rumen, so I don’t know if they are usurping the birds job of finding them new homes. They are often mentioned in texts relating to edible native plants, but their reputation exceeds the reality of the culinary experience. There’s a little bland material surrounding a cavity full of tough seeds (they wouldn’t get through a bird’s gut able to germinate if they weren’t tough, would they). I’ve eaten plenty, but there are better choices. So, prairie rose is a candidate for the seed bank, though not a high priority, because of its ubiquity, and I am still deciding on the Rosa blanda. Below is the evidence of cattle preferences with several chewed off rose stems. Below that is a pan of drying rose hips. And below that is a picture of Rosa blanda along our little lake.

78. Canada Milkvetch (Astragalus canadensis) Unlike the several Astragalus sp. that I listed earlier that grow on xeric sites, Canada milkvetch is a lover of mesic areas. I had some in the original CRP mix that was planted, and a large number of plants established on xeric areas of the restoration, a couple of which are in the picture below, looking a bit sad residing in such a droughty soil. Canada milkvetch is another of the clonal species, often showing up in discrete patches which likely have their origin in one seed. Our example below will not make a patch, and is more likely to disappear from this site, outcompeted by the yellow coneflower, purple prairie clover, yarrow and blanketflower it is surrounded by, along with the grasses. It provides a dilemma for the seed bank as I am once more uncertain of the source of the seed in the CRP mix. However, I have been gathering and adding local milkvetch seed, including from my prairies, and I hope to be able to represent it as local origin seed in a few years after any unsuited plants die. The assumption will be that anything that lives for ten years is adapted to our climate and that a significant amount of the living plants come from my gathered seed. Like the rose it has the characteristic of being “cow candy”, as evidenced in the second picture of some that has been grazed. While it is resilient under light grazing, season long grazing will eliminate it from a pasture.

79. False Sunflower/Ox-eye Daisy/Smooth Oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides) False sunflower is a broadly adapted cousin of the true sunflowers, primarily an inhabitant of mesic prairies in this area, needing well drained soils. It is rare in pastures, grazed out with steady grazing. I have a few in my prairies, and a fair amount in the restoration. I gather seeds when I can, mostly from the dry mesic prairies at my friend, Tim Holtquists place. It is a low priority for the seed bank, but perhaps I can get enough to make it worthwhile. It was a part of the original seeding as it is fairly easy to “farm”, and seed is cheap. The local seed purveyor, Milborns, offers it as South Dakota sourced seed, but I am suspicious its origin is from a CRP seeding that likely planted seed grown in Iowa. So it goes once again. Ambivalence rarely accomplishes anything, yet that is where I stand on its use in the seed bank now. I will not to stay ambivalent about anything for long, however. Still, it is not a high priority.

80. Horsemint/Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa). Monarda is yet another forb that is quite common in the seed trade. Much like the false sunflower it is reasonably priced, (usually coming from Iowa sources) and easy to establish, so it is often a part of diverse pollinator seedings and restorations. I have a few in my native prairies and a large number from that good Iowa seed in the restoration. I have gathered some from my friend Tim’s prairie and from a couple other prairies, but I am certain that almost all of the plants in my restoration have an origin in Iowa. Thus, it is unlikely to be considered in my seed bank. I have one memory from college of making mint tea with horsemint leaves. As I remember it was pleasant, but not enough to cause me to gather and dry leaves for storage. I also have a few plants of spotted horsemint (Monarda punctata) in the restoration that were not specifically purchased, but came along for the ride with some other seed. It is not native here, though it is in Minnesota, so I am just having fun seeing a few. Below is a Monarda fistulosa in bloom, and below that one in the restoration at maturity.

81. Black-Eyed Susan (R;udbeckia hirta) This will finish this batch of common prairie plants that were seeded with the Conservation District drill in the original CRP seeding. Again, the seed is cheap, from questionable sources, and I have a few in my native prairies. However, it is not a major component of my native prairies, nor is it important to my seed bank project. This is particularly popular for pollinator mixes sold by various seed vendors because it is a biennial, and thus can establish the year of seeding and provide oodles of flowers the next year. It tends to diminish as the seeding develops and fewer spaces can be found by the seeds. I had those oodles the second year of the restoration, and now see some here and there sporadically each summer. It is almost a bit weedy, as it shows up in ditches and waste areas and grows across the entire eastern half of the country. I found a picture of it hanging around some other items I had photographed, so did a little editing and came up with a decent offering.

82. Prairie lettuce (Lactuca ludoviciana), I think. I put the qualifier there because while reading up on this, I’m realizing that I could have the wrong lettuce species. There are several choices, all biennials, many not native, whose seeds blow around to find disturbed areas to start in. It is scattered throughout my gravelly hills, often finding its biotic space in wetter years on the comparatively open gravel hills. Though it leans a bit weedy, in my prairies it never is aggressive, taking the crumbs it is left by the perennials and having attractive blue flowers that I assume feed various pollinators. Still, as a ubiquitous species that can colonize ditches and waste areas, it is not a priority for the seed bank.

83. Dotted Gayfeather (Liatris punctata) This is one of the plants that I probably knew when I was 6 or 7, helping get prairie hay bales by driving our WD Allis with a hand clutch slowly between bales while my brother threw them on the hay rack. It grows all over the gravel hills, giving quite a show in late July and August as it blooms for several weeks. I have thousands in my native prairies and perhaps a hundred in the restoration. It is not totally conservative, the seeds blowing around and colonizing gravel roadsides that border native pastures. It is very showy, very tough, and somewhat of an iconic prairie species to me, almost to the same extent as black samson, prairie turnip and pasqueflower. The leaves can be a bit sharp as they mature, necessitating gloves to gather (likely that is why it has the species epithet “punctata”), but it is pretty easy to gather otherwise, stripping the seeds along with other flower parts and some leaves to fill your bag. Though it is not uncommon, with a wide range, it is still an important plant for the seed bank. Seed is not cheap, $25/ounce, so almost a penny per seed from Prairie Moon Seeds, probably from a combination of being hard to “farm” and from problems with germination because of seed predators. In the picture below it is in the lower left, along with a group of prairie onions, silky asters and a couple yellow coneflowers in the upper right. In the bottom of the picture are some flax plants that appear about to bloom. This is a picture from a sidehill in a native pasture, and you can also see seedheads of porcupine grass arcing across the bottom of the picture, while a little higher up I think it is needle and thread, a rare juxtaposition in the same picture, denoting a quick change from a dry mesic soil at the bottom to a more xeric soil as one travels up the hill.

84 and 85. Rough Gayfeather (or Blazing Star) (Liatris aspera) and Northern Plains Gayfeather (or Blazing Star) (Liatris ligulistylis). These two members of the Liatris genus are grouped together because, to be honest, they are damned hard to tell apart. The two pictures below are first, Liatris aspera, and below, Liatris ligustylis. If you would go to a plant key you would find verbiage talking about features of their flower bracts, the leaflike coverings around the actual flower that are often assumed to be parts of the flower. However, there’s an easier way. If you look at the top picture you will see all the upper flowers attached almost directly to the stalk. In the lower picture the flowers have an inch long stem which attaches to the stalk. Of course, L. aspera sometimes has short flower stalks as in the lower flowers below just to mess with a person. On top of that I’ve read they can hybridize, not a big surprise when you look at them. L. aspera favors drier habitats and I have some in my prairies and I see many in some nearby prairies. I’ve gathered many from my friend Tim’s dry mesic prairie. L. ligustylis favors wetter environments and I have none in my prairies, though I can find some a few miles away, where my friend Levi Waddell gathers seed. Thus, they are part of the seed bank project, though the whole hybridization issue has me wondering.

86. Prairie Ragwort/Groundsel (Packera plattensis) I have little to talk about here, and no good picture. Most springs there will be 7-10 days where the xeric hilltops have large populations of the pretty yellow blooms of the ragwort waving 12-18″ in the air, towering over all the other short cool season forbs. A week later the seed is formed, and in perhaps another week it all blows away in the late spring winds. In short, it’s a bugger to gather seed for; you need to be out there in a very short window of time. It is fairly tolerant of grazing, more common in the lightly grazed pasture than in the old hayland. I don’t see it in the more heavily grazed pasture next to the farmsite, however. There are many hundreds in the two native pastures, and I have seen a couple that have established in the restoration. I think it is a short lived plant which implies that it is good at establishing in existing sod, so I hope to finally get the right day to gather seed and get some spread over the restoration. As a very widely distributed, somewhat weedy native it is a low priority for the seed bank.

87. Canada Anemone (Anemone canadensis) Unlike the other two anemones that inhabit my prairies, pasqueflower and thimbleweed, Canada anemone is a denizen of mesic environments, sometimes even wet mesic. It is another clonal species, spreading by rhizomes to form patches at the base of many hills in my native prairies. I have not so far been able to get colonies started in the restorations, but am confident it is just a matter of time. A few plants can easily turn into a few hundred. Canada anemone is not a very conservative species, often showing up in road ditches, and has a huge native range, so it is a low priority for the seed bank. The seeds have a complicated dormancy, so it may even be most efficient to dig up some rhizomes to plant. The picture below shows a patch in bloom, as well as my ineptitude in keeping the lens clean on my cell phone.

88. Field Pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta) There are several species of pussytoes, of which the most likely to be found here is A. neglecta, so that is what I assume this is. I have a few patches in my native prairies, and a few patches have started in the restoration. As the picture shows, it is very short, with basal leaves and seedheads that only shoot up a few inches, spreading by stolons, so I mostly see them in bare, or disturbed areas in the prairie. A. neglecta has a large range, and seems to find places to establish both in native prairies, and occasionally in other disturbed areas, so it is a low priority for the seed bank. Both pictures below are from the restoration, the bottom picture showing the leaves.

89. Milkwort (Polygala alba, I think) There are several similar milkworts, but P. alba is a western species that both fits the description and the gravel hill sites where I find hundreds or perhaps thousands of them. There is a closely related species with the wonderful name “Seneca snakeroot”, which is much more evocative than writing “white milkwort”. As the picture shows there will be areas with many, many white to pale lavender blooms in June and July, probably again from rhizomatous growth. I have tried to gather seed a few times, but the little buggers take a long time to mature and then seem to disappear. I have yet to see any in the restoration, so alas, they are not yet in the seed bank, though if someone wants to crawl around in July to see if some seed can be found they will be welcome to the attempt.

90. Early Figwort (Scrophularia lanceolata) I had never heard of figworts until one day while collecting seed, Ben was excited to find some. All I could reply was, “Figwort? What the hell is that?” It turns out that I have a few in three or four mesic areas in my native prairies and have established some in two of my restoration plantings. Thus. they are becoming a favorite plant, one of the few that will find a way to grow in the brome patches in the valleys. I am hoping to continue to increase the populations and would like to find another native seed source in the area. They are reputed to be magnets for bees and hummingbirds because their subtle little flowers practically drip nectar, hoping to draw in pollinators to take their pollen elsewhere. There are few enough in my prairies that augmenting their population is a priority, and they are definitely in the seed bank. Unfortunately, no pictures, probably because they have no showy flower. I will be sure to remedy that this summer and get a photo inserted in this post.

91. Chickweed (Cerastium arvense) Though there are thousands across the native prairie hills I have never been able to gather much seed and I have not noticed them in the restoration. They are tiny, sneaky little things, so they may be there. They are a low priority for the seed bank. The only picture that I could find was of a mature plant when I was picking textile onion seed, which is the little plant in the upper right. The chickweed is the tan plant to the left with the tubular flower husks, presumably with some seeds inside. If this is a good year for textile onions I will likely gather them together as they both occur in the same xeric sites, and also will try to get a better picture.

92. Flodmans thistle (Cirsium flodmanii) Another thing that I learned once I began studying prairie plants more intensely a few years back was that all thistles are not the spawn of the devil. I have been conditioned to view them that way primarily by fighting Canada thistles in cropped fields, but also by battling with invasive bull thistles and plumeless thistles in rangeland. A major job for my wife, Linda, each summer is to spend several days driving around her pastures on an ATV with a mounted sprayer to try to treat every invasive thistle with herbicide, quite a job on 420 acres. Invariably she will come in after many sessions of driving around the pasture announcing that she has completed the task, only to go back a week or two later to “mop up” the many thistles she overlooked. Our native thistles tend to be superficially similar, but a whole other animal. Most striking is their lack of the dense thicket of spines that the various invasive thistles have, meaning that they can be grazed by both native herbivores and livestock, unlike bull thistle or plumeless thistle. Neither are they rhizomatous like Canada thistle. They play nice. I have many across my prairie hills, scattered across the xeric and dry mesic areas, and a few in the restoration which have blown in on their own. I have never collected seed from them; they tend to bloom over a long period meaning there are never many seedheads to collect, and the seeds absciss and blow away in a wind. Add to that the scattered nature of their occurrence and it is difficult to gather much. I hope to try this summer, and probably to add it to the seed bank. Wavyleaf thistle (Cirsium undulatum) is another possible species I may have, though my poor botanical skills have only identified Flodman’s thistle so far.

93 and 94. American Vetch (Vicia americana) and Veiny Pea (Lathyrus venosus) Both of these are members of the pea family which aren’t common in my prairies. I have a good number of vetch plants vining around in parts of the restoration, and, while I have not found any veiny pea plants in the restoration yet, I have spread seed that Ben has gathered, and hope to see some soon. Both could become part of the seed bank, but that will demand a lot more plants establishing over the next few years. While I will take opportunities to gather and spread their seed neither is a high priority. Of the two, veiny pea is the higher priority as it has a more limited range, and there seems to be more opportunities to gather some seed locally.

95. American licorice (Glycyrrhiza lepidota) Birders have a phrase, “nemesis bird”, to refer to one they are unable to catch sight of, even after numerous attempts when the target is known to be in the area where the birder is looking. Thus, I have christened licorice my nemesis wildflower. I have many patches in my native prairies, some within 100 feet of the restoration. I have gathered pounds of seed to spread. Still, I have yet to see a single licorice in the restoration. Last fall I noticed a patch (licorice are aggressively rhizomatous) that had started to invade the fenceline adjoining the restoration. All my attempts may have gone for naught (though it is quite possible I have just missed some), but a determined clone of licorice may do what I have not been able to do. Once established, I have no doubt they will prosper in the mesic valleys in the restoration. They are definitely part of plans for the seedbank.

96 Wood Betony (Pedicularis canadensis) Wood betony and its close relative in the second picture, swamp betony, are both parasitic species, with wood betony across the hills, and swamp betony in the low, damp areas. Neither is common in my prairies, but both occur in the immediate area, though we are on the western edge of the home territory for both. I have a few of each in the restoration, and hope to establish more, so that they can be included in the seed bank.

97. Swamp Betony (Pedicularis lanceolata)

98. Skeleton Plant (Lygodesmia juncea) This is yet one more of the humble, small plants of the gravel hills. I have them scattered throughout the native prairies, but they are difficult to gather seed from. If I can accomplish that and get some started in the restorations I will consider entering them into the list for the seedbank.

99. Louisiana broomrape (Orobanche ludoviciana) I really have nothing significant to say about broomrape, but use it as an example of just how much there is to learn. I came upon the little plant below two summers ago on a hilltop and had no clue of what I had discovered. I sent a picture to my friend, Ben, and one of us came up with an ID. I knew nothing of this plant and had never seen one in all my years of walking these prairies. Plants do not always bloom. Annuals do not always germinate. an observer is not always in the right place at the right time. Several years ago in a different prairie we own 25 miles east of here near the Minnesota border I came upon a small orchid. I have never seen it again and don’t even remember the name. Species that have very small populations are by definition always at risk to disappear, The resiliency of millions of acres of prairie surrounding you, with almost unlimited resources to resupply a population that was lost in an area are no longer there. This is the real lesson that I have learned and the purpose of the seed bank. I have enough acres available theoretically to provide stable populations of a great many species if I can find diverse sources of seed to provide a broad genetic base, and if I can find a way to get enough of the those species established. Thus, when I say a plant is part of the seed bank it means that I will try to establish enough plants to sustain a presence for that species through the years, and that I will try to access seed and establish plants from a variety of populations to provide some genetic diversity and avoid inbreeding, which supports that longevity. It’s a big job, and one that I will not finish in my lifetime, though I hope to provide a good start, and ideas for those who come after me. These blog posts are part of establishing a base of information to guide those efforts. The little broomrape is below.

100. Rattlesnake Root/Glaucous White Lettuce (Nabalus (or Prenanthes) racemosa) I end with another plant that I do not have in my prairies, but that is commonly found in this area. I have established a few in the restoration through the use of seedling plugs and would like to do more. I do not know the significance of this plant to pollinators, small mammals or other insects, but I really like it. Perhaps its the name, I don’t know. This is the far western edge of their range, and I would love to get enough going to add them to the seedbank. I know several prairies where I can gather some seed, and will likely grow more plugs in an attempt to make the best use of that seed. We will see what Ben and I can accomplish. If I see some able to bloom in the restoration this summer I will add a picture.

That will do it for now. I am running out of plants for which I have stories and pictures, but I am not running out of plants that are native to the area nor have I exhausted plants which are native to my humble prairies. Similar to the story about the broomrape, last summer Ben helped me find two species of the genus Agalinis, the false foxgloves, that I had never seen before. Both are annuals which germinated, grew and made seed because of the wet year. Both were limited to small areas in my pasture which I might not walk over at the right time of year to see, or if I did they it might be the wrong year to see them. I am at a loss so far in how to respond to what may be 50 species that are hard to find, but that might be important to increase. I have plenty to occupy my time and attention, and all I can tell myself is that it’s all good; since I have a hard time determining what is most important, I should just do good work and accept the uncertainty. Again, so it goes. This will be the last post on the forbs for now, though I may insert others as they come to mind. Next I will try to do a post on the grasses.

Plants of Central Point Prairies 51-75

I start my third go at documenting the plants of my prairies with a realization that this may be the last concentration upon the forbs, and that there will be fewer pictures. Many of the more common, better known, and more commonly photographed species have gone into the first two installments. We will see what I can come up with.

51 and 52. White/Cudleaf Sage (Artemisia ludoviciana and Fringed Sage (Artemisia frigida) Fringed sage is a ubiquitous, grazing tolerant forb of the tops of most prairie hills. As such it tends to be an increaser in native pastures, though not an obtrusive one, at least in this area. It is a small plant, rarely a foot high and “plays nice” with its neighbors. It is a plant that I knew well as a 10 year old sent out to bring the cows in for milking. The smell is a very pleasant sage smell, much nicer than the invasive wormwood sage (Artemisia absinthium) which is a significant weed of pastures and waste areas (including our farmyard). I have thousands in my native prairie and many in the restorations, some presumably from gathered seed, though most are likely from purchased seed. White, or cudleaf sage has a wider ecological niche, from better xeric soil through mesic areas. In my native prairies it is mostly found towards the base of the hills in what might be called dry mesic, though still sandy, droughty soils. It is very common, also tolerant of some grazing, though not heavy grazing, and I have many in both the native and restored prairies. If some get started, they are very good at building clonal patches as shown below. The white sage are the gray plants with the narrow leaves, all due to a single germinating seed. I’m guessing that it would not be unusual to find up to 100 stems over an area the size of a garage stall all coming from a single seed. The lower picture shows a small clone, on the right side of the picture grown to full height of about 18-24″, with the larger gray plants in the background being wormwood sage. These are both widely distributed forbs which will likely be in the seed bank, but are not top priorities.

53. False Gromwell (Onosmodium molle) False gromwell is a relative of the puccoons which I discussed in the first installment of this series. It is not enjoyed by cattle, and definitely thrives in an overgrazed pasture, such as the one to the west of my prairies. I have a few in my native prairies and a few in the restoration. It seems to occur in both xeric and dry mesic areas, and the common thread may be the same as the puccoons, that it has a hard, white, very visible seed that birds likely eat and distribute wherever they go next. As a common, weedy plant of overgrazed pastures it is not a priority for me. Below is a very large, vigorous example in bloom.

54. Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) Yarrow is another ubiquitous, well known native, partially because it has a very distinctive smell and taste. In large quantities it is toxic, but like most things that is dose dependent, and cattle don’t like it well enough to harm themselves. When I was doing my edible plant experimenting as a teenager I tried a tea made from yarrow, based upon something I read of its use as a cold remedy. All I can say was that one big sip of the tea was reminiscent of too much Vicks VapoRub in ones nose. Whatever else it will do, it will clear a your sinuses. One often sees insects upon it during its long bloom period, so it likely is useful for various pollinators. It grows all across the temperate Northern Hemisphere, and as it is sometimes used as an ornamental, some of the yarrow in our native prairies likely has Eurasian genetics. It is unlikely to be part of the seed bank.

55. False Boneset (Brickellia eupatoroides) One of many poorly named plants, it has nothing to do with bonesets, a forb from an unrelated family adapted to wet sites whose only relationship I can see is that they both have white flowers. Chris Helzer, on his “Prairie Ecologist” blog went off on the whole tradition of naming plants “false this” or “false that” a while back. There may be situations where the designation is helpful, but I tend to agree, plant species deserve their own names. False boneset is a perfectly respectable member of the Asteraceae family adapted to dry mesic soils. It will colonize ditches and waste areas occasionally and has a large native range, so it is not a plant that needs much assistance. I do not have any in my prairies, but have some in the restoration from seed that I have gathered elsewhere nearby. Reputedly, it is much used by pollinators.

56. Western Snowberry/Buckbrush (Symphoricarpos occidentalis) Commonly known as buckbrush, as the 24″ tall patches are wonderful places to hide if you are a deer, but they are also wonderful places to hide if you are a newborn calf. If one of the dairy cows had a calf out in the pasture, they would often stash their baby in a buckbrush patch and come home with the herd to the yard for water. My Dad would see that the cow had calved and tell me to wait until the cow went back out and find the calf to bring home. It was necessary to have the cow nearby as if the calf was startled without its mother it might just blow out through a fence to get away from the predator (me) that had found it. We never found one calf I accidentally startled and my father was very upset that I had been so careless. I was probably only 10, but even at that age we were supposed to know what we were doing. Calves were usually worth $50-100 at the sales barn and the money was important. Overgrazed pastures can get some substantial, thick patches, and the rancher will be tempted to use herbicide, but if grazing is moderate buckbrush is really not a problem. A year or two ago I would have said that it was not important to me, but I am reconsidering.

57. Stiff Sunflower (Helianthus pauciflorus) Stiff sunflower, to me, is one of the more interesting wildflowers. Most species do best, and are most competitive in a particular type of site. Their particular blend of physiology and structure has a “best fit”. Stiff sunflower is a generalist, ranging from xeric to mesic soils more than any other species I can think of. They present themselves differently, however. In xeric sites they are often just vegetative shoots, rarely blooming, and relying upon their rhizomes to find new homes by cloning new shoots. In a year like 2022 or 2025 many of those shoots will send flower heads a couple feet in the air and reproduce sexually. They will also grow, however. in full mesic soils, sending many flowers three or even four feet into the air. My question is: are these two disparate manifestations the same genetics, having almost magical abilities to grow in any well drained soil except super-xeric gravel? Or are they two different ecotypes living side by side, having such wide genetic possibilities that they are beginning to separate genetically? The first answer is very likely correct, because cross pollination will tend to rein in the outriders. It’s hard to separate genetically when you live next to each other. Once again, life is much more varied and interesting than the boundaries our brains try to put around things. Below is a xeric hill where they seldom bloom, but in 2025 we received 10-12″ rain in June and July, and they remembered they were wildflowers. This is a high priority for me.

58 and 59. Maximillian Sunflower (Helianthus maximilliani) and Sawtooth Sunflower (Helianthus grosserserratus) While I have many stiff sunflowers in my prairies, I have just a few of these two more robust species. Maximillian sunflower is a common resident of mesic prairies, while sawtooth sunflower leans more toward wet mesic, and is less common in this area, though I have some of each in my native prairie, and thus they theoretically could become part of the seed bank project. Maximillian is easy to grow and seed is cheap, thus it became part of my original seed mixes, and I had many in the restorations. Most of the original restoration, however, is really too droughty for it to thrive, and every year I see less. As I don’t know the provenance of the seed the decrease doesn’t really bother me. I do have a good source of Maximillian seed to gather, however, at my wife’s mesic prairies down on her grazing system 30 miles east of here. I have gathered a little there and in a couple other prairies in the past and put some of it out in the restoration, but I think I need to be a little more purposeful and gather a good quantity for the 10-20 acres where it is adapted. Similarly, I have a good patch of sawtooth sunflower along a wet area in one of my relict prairies, and should do a better job of getting some of it in some appropriate sites. Below is the first sawtooth sunflower I saw in the restoration, with what I think are maximillian sunflowers in the background to the left. If I achieve the above goal of more local seed turning into plants they will be part of the seed bank.

60, 61 and 62. Missouri Goldenrod (Solidago missouriensis), Stiff Goldenrod (Sollidago or Oligoneuron rigida) and Canada Goldenrod (Solidago canadensis) Of all the species in the prairie these may be the most polarizing. They are common in my native prairies, especially Missouri, almost ubiquitous, much like stiff sunflower, growing across many sites. Many native pastures in the area have much thicker stands, due to overgrazing, and it has probably induced as much herbicide spraying as any plant. Obviously, as an increaser, it is not heavily grazed, but my wife says there is certainly grazing of the goldenrods, especially early in the year. Xerces Society did a study showing it as a good source of nutrition. However, there is a reason why they become so widespread and sometimes thick in overgrazed pastures. They become less palatable as they age, allowing them to build up large stores of carbohydrates in their roots, which then fuel the spread of rhizomes and ultimately more shoots. Are ranchers justified in spraying herbicides to combat goldenrod? I used to think so, but am less certain of it now for three reasons. First, a thick stand of Missouri and/or stiff goldenrod is a sign of an overgrazed pasture, and first that issue must be addressed. Second, while more grass will likely grow with less goldenrod my wife has proved to me that the goldenrod does not preclude good grass growth. She gets lots of grazing in paddocks that have lots of goldenrod (the goldenrod spread originally before we purchased the pasture). And finally, goldenrod is an excellent pollinator food, blooming over a long period of time and providing both pollen and nectar. Canada goldenrod is a plant of mesic to wet mesic areas, so less common for me, but is comsidered a pest in pastures (and restorations) in better soils and moister climates, especially in the tallgrass country to the south and east of here. Below is the only picture of Missouri goldenrod I could find, a fun picture of bees on stiff goldenrod and a picture of Canada goldenrod near a saturated area on Huggett’s. As extremely common plants I have never considered worrying about propagating them, but it is worth pondering., especially the Missouri.

63. Silky Aster (Symphyotrichum sericium) There are some genera of plants that have large populations, finding many ways to riff on a theme. The asters are such a genus, with Wikipedia listing 106. Silky is one of the two which are ubiquitous in the prairies around here along with the next entry, heath aster. most common in rings around the hills, avoiding the deeper valleys which are often choked with brome and the most xeric sites, but common in a wide band around most hills. It is tolerant of grazing, welcomed by pollinators of many kinds, and both the flowers and the foliage are beautiful. The “silky” in its name comes from the silky feel of the leaves caused by the many fine hairs of the leaves, which also give it a silver or gray sheen unique among asters that grow around here. All in all it is a plant that I love to see. It is scattered through the restorations, and I hope to keep gathering seed, which is pretty easy in those years when summer rains are kind, so I can keep flinging them on appropriate sites. Below is a clone growing in some native prairie a few weeks after a burn, surrounded by some shoots of stiff sunflower.

64. Heath Aster (S. ericoides) Heath aster is perhaps the most commonly found aster in native prairies across the country, It has an enormous range, found in all but a few states, along with all the Canadian provinces that border the US. While the seed is not easy to gather, as it doesn’t strip easily, the seeds are very small, blow in the wink to travel everywhere and seemingly very fertile. Though I threw out very little seed, I have many in the restoration, perhaps coming from natural propagation, blowing in from the neighborhood. This can happen with many asters, goldenrods, gayfeathers and other wildflowers which have small seeds with fluffy tufts that blow in the wind. In either case, I have many scattered through the prairie restoration. Perhaps a corollary might be Missouri goldenrod as they will colonize overgrazed pastures, and also spread by rhizomes, though less aggressively than the goldenrod. As a kid I saw them as weeds. Then, in college I read a wonderful little book delineating all the major plant communities of the United States on an accompanying map, as well as a list of common species in each map unit, and heath aster was in many of the biome lists, including all the prairie categories in the Northern Great Plains. I have given it more respect ever since., except that I see that I have never photographed it. I will remedy that next year.

65. Aromatic Aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) Another aster that’s common in my native prairies on the most xeric hills. Like many asters it has the ability to reproduce clonally, spreading rhizomes over horrible rocky soils where little else will grow. There are either very few to none, or a lot, implying there might not be that many individual, discrete plants, but some very successful, prolific cloned individuals. When blooming it is easy to distinguish from silky aster, which often grows nearby on slightly better soil, but at maturity when they are both drying down and I am trying to gather seed they look very much alike. This makes gathering a pure seed sample difficult, as I don’t want to take time to look at each one closely to distinguish the species that I want. In the end, the sites they inhabit are similar enough the I will accept some contamination. Descriptions I see on websites tend to describe a plant more robust and flexible in site preference than I see in my prairies, so just as with white prairie clover I think that the genetics growing in my prairies is different than the genetics of aromatic aster growing in other environments. This certainly doesn’t mean that I have my own variety, but rather it is an example that the world is a big place, and if you look around enough you will learn many things. I have no pictures of it in bloom, just humble vegetative growth hidden among other plants, so a picture will have to wait until next fall.

66 and 67. Sky Blue Aster (S. oolentangiense) and Smooth Blue Aster (S. laeve). Both these asters are rarely found in this area, mostly native to slightly moister areas to our east. They are easy to purchase as seed, so I bought some of each. They are hard for me to tell apart as well, but there are records of them in this area, so I include them without any accompanying stories. In my picture archive I call this smooth blue, but really aren’t sure. Asters can be difficult to tell apart.

68. New England Aster (S. novae-angliae) I almost included this with the two species above. This is a robust aster with a beautiful flower which is often added to seed mixes as the seed is comparatively cheap. It is also adapted to more mesic sites than most of my restoration, so I wasn’t too impressed that I have seen some in my restoration. Then I came upon some in a prairie a few miles away, causing me to reconsider my lack of interest. I haven’t decided whether to add this to the list of species for the seed bank; there are certainly higher priorities to increase, but I’m leaving it on the list for now.

69. Blue Lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica) I have three lobelias in the restorations, one of which, cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) is not native this far west, and is thus not on the list. Blue lobelia, much like New England aster is native here, barely, and so I would have included it anyway, with hundreds in two different restorations, blooming in years with August rain. Then, this September I came upon the plants below along the edge of a slough in a native pasture. I had never seen them in my prairies before, never having come upon the right spot at the right time when they were blooming. I sat down a little uphill and stared at them for some time. When I texted a picture to my partner, Ben, he asked whether I thought they might have spread there from the restoration. If you look below at the second picture you will see a poor picture from the restoration on a windy day. Yes, they are the same species, but they are not from the same seed source. I like my native plants better and plan to gather seed next year if they bloom again.

70. Pale Spike Lobelia (Lobelia spicata). Though there are obviously characteristics of the flowers and seed which have caused botanists to place these in the same genus, the similarities to blue lobelia are not obvious to me. As the first picture showed, blue lobelia is a plant that grows in moist soils; it doesn’t mind wet feet. It is also a robust plant, sometimes called “Great” blue lobelia. Pale spiked lobelia is a humble little plant that prefers well drained mesic sites, hiding among the clumps of porcupine grass on a couple hills on my prairies. I have seeded some and planted a few plugs, but don’t know if I have any in my restoration yet. They did enjoy the summer rains and put on a pleasant show in my native pasture as seen below. I was able to gather some seed and will try again to get some into the restorations. I would like it to be part of the seed bank.

71 and 72. Hoary Vervain (Verbena stricta) and Blue Vervain (Verbena hastata). Hoary vervain is common, though scattered on both the native and the restored prairies. It is one of several plants that I used to be quite ambivalent about as they fit under the old range management rubric as “increasers”, plants that become more common with prolonged grazing, with the implication they were increasing at the expense of “decreasers”, plants that disappeared under long term grazing. The accompanying implication was that decreasers were good and holy, while increasers were bad and perhaps a bit naughty, if not actually evil. Hoary vervain is an increaser. If your only criteria for judging the plants were pounds of beef produced there is more than a hint of truth to this characterization, though as I stated earlier it may be best to judge slowly and carefully. These are plants (I will add another below) which are native in the prairies, have their own relationships with pollinators, seed predators, insect larvae and presumably fungi and microorganisms. In other words, important plants. Funny how many things you can learn after you turn 60 if you are out in the real world, rather than bound within the strictures of the interior world we all create. Unlike hoary vervain, which is flexible in site preference, blue vervain is a wet mesic species who doesn’t mind wet feet on occasion. I have some in the restoration and don’t think I have any in my native prairies. Below is a hoary vervain from the restoration.

73. Yellow Coneflower (Ratibida columnifera) One more of the native increasers, but one I am more kindly disposed towards. It seems to be a humble plant that, while it does increase with prolonged grazing, it plays nice and never dominates a pasture the way the goldenrods seem to. In order to get a picture for the blog post I had to cut a little chunk from a picture of other flowers. If I get a better picture I will replace this one. I have another coneflower in my restoration, gray headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata), but though we are listed as on the western edge of its territory, I have not seen one in the wild near here, thus no separate entry.

74. Silverleaf Scurfpea (Pediomelum argophylum) This is yet another plant that will increase under grazing, though not a weed in pastures. It is a legume, which often means “cow candy” but I assume it houses some chemicals that repel grazers. It is a bit showy with silvery gray foliage that can stand out from a distance. In descriptions it is listed as an inhabitant of dry mesic sites, or just “dry prairies”. In my skewed world that means it inhabits the bases of hills and could be considered a mesic adapted species. Whatever. It is not fully conservative, showing up occasionally in disturbed areas, deposited by birds who eat, and then defecate the seeds, wasting their effort to gain nutrients, but accomplishing the goal of the devious plant. It makes very few seeds, however, choosing to spread clonally, and I have not seen any in my restoration, though I have plenty in the native prairies. I will add a picture when I find one.

75. Breadroot scurfpea (Pediomelum esculentum) This is my favorite of of all the prairie plants, on a par with pasqueflower, and I have known about it about as long, since I was 4 or 5 years old going out with my older brother. Every year we would go out in early summer and dig up a few prairie turnips, as we called them, peel off the tough covering, and eat the starchy, fibrous root. It was no delicacy, but pleasant enough and a neat thing to do when you are a kid. Usually we would have a jackknife we would ruin digging in the stones and dirt trying to get deep enough to yank out the bulb. Sadly I can no longer find them in the home pasture where the dairy cows grazed, as another 60-65 years of grazing was too much for them. They are scattered throughout the hills of the native prairies, however, and I will find a few when I trespass on the neighbors to look around. It disperses its seed by breaking off at the base and tumbling across the hills, dropping seeds as it rolls, which seems to be a successful strategy. While I likely have 200-400 in my prairies I have only found a few from my attempts with both seeds and seedling plugs in the restoration. This is a high priority for me to add to the seedbank, so I will keep trying. A picture of a beloved plant is a nice way to wrap up this post, this plant about to begin putting out its lavender to blue flowers.

The Plan for 2026

I write this in mid-December, a time when it can be hard to visualize spring returning. After a couple very easy winters we have returned to what used to be reality before our climate changed. It sucks. Still, all things pass, and though there has been some difficult driving already , roads are not building the type of lanes caused by snowplows that fill in with every breeze, and it got above freezing for a couple days last week. I’m thankful for that. Thus, I will pretend that spring is imminent and start to put ideas together for what I hope to accomplish next year.

The overarching umbrella shading all the hopes for the restorations now is the “living seed bank”, which I use to describe my attempts to create sizeable populations of as many of the native forbs (and a few grasses) of this area as possible, ideally becoming a one-stop shop for anyone desiring seed to increase for restorations in this geography. This will be populated by plants from my prairies, and augmented by plants derived from other prairies in this area, hopefully giving enough genetic variability to create a resilient population and avoid inbreeding. There is no gatherable species list that I would feel able to share with others yet, as the development of this seed bank is very much a work in progress, even as I enter the ninth year of working on these restorations, though I could probably give a short list of species that I feel there is good progress on. I have commented on this on many species in the two posts on “The Plants of Central Point Prairies”, but at some point I probably need to start a spreadsheet estimating populations and seed potential of every species in the prairies. Maybe I will return to that later this winter. For now, however, there are so many things that can be improved that fine tuning actions are not really needed. Here are some of my ideas I’m thinking through.

My first dilemma in all of this is how to get new seedlings started in existing restorations. Life fills spaces; it uses opportunities, and biotic space will be filled sooner rather than later. How do new plants establish in and among existing plants in the restorations, and in the native prairies as well. For the first two or three years of the restorations the spaces were not yet filled, or were filled with placeholders, if you will; annuals such as cheatgrass, foxtails and ragweed, biennials such as sand sage, sweetclover and weedy cinquefoils, and short-lived perennials such as dandelions and wormwood sage insinuated themselves into all the spaces. Even Canada thistle, an extremely competetive clonal perennial that drives me to distraction, is ultimately just a successional waystation. They are, at least, if there are enough of the better adapted perennial native plants getting going, ready to take the torch, so to speak, to move the planting forward to a prairie. It is not that easy to go from step one to step two to nirvana, however. New seeds don’t always turn into new plants. Those placeholders can fight to hold on to their place, making it very difficult for the supposedly logical succession to a stable composition of prairie plants to develop. This is especially true as the whole concept of a stable composition is a Jenga game sitting upon loose sand. Blocks are always moving in and out, and the edifice ready to crumble and rebuild into a new form. Stability is not easily attained, and perhaps not desirable.

In short, I have no idea what a “real prairie” should look like in my environment, and if I did, I wouldn’t know how to get there. What I know is a somewhat vague image of what I hope can be attained, and that image includes a lot more forbs from species already existing in my relict prairies. It seems a good outcome, and it is what I am working towards. This is difficult to accept sometimes, as I have those relict prairies staring me in the face every time I go out to my home farm. Those prairies are not a bad image to try to re-create, but I am coming to realize their limitations, as well as my limitations in re-creating them.

Which circles me back to my goal, the establishment of more of my native forbs, both from “my” prairies and from a host of nearby prairies, both in the restoration and, starting this year, in the relict prairies. In pursuit of that goal my partner Ben and I have spread a lot of seed the past two years over about 70 acres which were burned in three separate burns. We still have perhaps 10-20 pounds of additional gathered seed, along with whatever I am able to purchase this winter, ready to be added to what has already been spread on the two patches that were burned last year.

Or perhaps we will save that seed, and the seed we purchase, for the 20-25 acres of native pasture that we hope to burn this spring. On those acres we have the two disadvantages of getting new seed started on “old growth’ prairie, and of spreading seed in the spring rather than the fall, but we have the advantage that we can send a cowherd out after there is enough regrowth from the fire to graze. The cattle can stomp in the seed while holding down the established grasses. This is the beginning of the 2026 plan: execute a burn, spread seed, and bring the cows to help us out. Below is part of what we hope to burn. I was just out there and this flat area on top of a sandy hill has a fair amount of brome, but it is too droughty for the brome to take over. On this hill there are perhaps 10 grass species of which 8 are native, hopefully ready to move into the spaces occupied by the brome. In addition there are probably 40-50 species of wildflowers, most of which are priorities for me. I am really looking forward to what a burn and some timely grazing will do here. I am already starting to work on a seeding list for this.

Over the past several years we have planted a lot of seedling plugs of at least 30 species, and as far as I can see we have damn little to show for it. Some of it was bad luck with timing, but I think mostly it was the simple fact that the world is a tough, competitive place for a tender young seedling. Though there are likely more live plants resulting from those efforts than I have noticed, at most there are 200-300 plants from transplanting 2000 plugs. I don’t think that it has been worth the effort. I think my strategy going forward will simply be more careful and targeted seed spreading and placement, even to the point of individually placing larger seeds in areas with less competition. I’ve done some of that the past couple years, but hope to do more of the tedious job this year. Maybe some tedium will be good for my character. I will still start seedlings and plant plugs for species with very small amounts of seed, but will prepare sites more carefully and “baby” the little guys, which might be possible if I am planting 50 or 100 rather than 500. Thus, in addition to spreading seed on the burned areas, I hope to spend time placing seed more carefully, mostly those seeds belonging to species for which I have the most interest, and only planting seedling plugs I feel I can care for. I will put an appendix at the end of this post to list them. Put highly targeted seeding and planting into the plan.

Moving back to the restored prairies, here’s a little walk through the last few years in a pretty xeric area of the original restoration. The first picture is from late June in 2021, when I began to see some of the desired species establish. The second picture is from 2022, four years after planting, when I saw, more species fill in, and more of the ground covered. The third picture is from a little ways away, but on a similar soil on the same hill showing what it had become by last year, 2025, almost entirely filled in. The pictures are cherry picked of course, but are still instructive. This hill was also spread with more seed a year and a half ago after being burned, and I doubt we are seeing any plants from that seeding yet; the change we see is just established plants getting older and bigger. The question again is: How do I make an area with this much competition get better, adding all those forbs I want to add. Or, do the seeds spread over a year ago have the chance to improve it? Should I do more?

To start, I probably won’t worry too much about areas that look like the picture above, but much of the restoration is far less diverse. There is a higher proportion of grass in less diverse areas, which is competing both above and below ground with the forbs, and the potential new plants I hope to come from the seed that I spread. I have spent a lot of time in the past year looking at my native prairies to compare, wondering how the forbs compete and continue to reproduce, and have come up with several thoughts that are, in effect, creating the 2026 plan and probably future plans, not replacing the burn and spread idea put forth above, but rather grounding it in a hopefully solid theoretical framework.

First, the process of generations of wildflowers succeeding each other in untilled native prairie happens, it “works”. Else where did all this wonderful diversity in my prairies come from? In the 80 acres of native prairie I have many thousands of black samson (Echinacea angustifolia) plants, many thousands of prairie onion (Allium stellatum) plants, probably well over a thousand leadplant (Amorpha canescens), thousands of pasqueflower (Anemone patens), and the list goes on. If you add clonal plants like stiff sunflower (Helianthus pauciflorus) or bastard toadflax (Comandra umbellata) the number of individual shoots is impossible to estimate. New seed finds a way into the system to become new plants. How do I mimic the natural processes in the native prairies to help the seeds find a job?

Another meaning of the term “seed bank” is the store of seed in the ground that has been deposited over the past several years. As an example, an individual wildflower plant may make 100 viable seeds per year over a ten year lifespan, 1000 seeds. If, on average, only one of those seeds becomes a mature plant spreading its own seeds we have a stable population; if two of them make it we have an increasing population. All these species of forbs have an evolutionary history which has guided them to invest resources in a certain type and amount of seeds to make. If something causes our example plant to make only 50 seeds per year we may have a declining population. Though most of the seeds will fall where they will be unable to create a new member of their species, some fluke happening such as a fire, or a pocket gopher dirt mound, or the hoof of a bison (or cow), or a field mouse that gathers but doesn’t eat the seed will create an opening in that prairie that allows a new seedling to develop and procreate. It could be as simple as a lot of seed is good, and even more seed is better. Do I just trust that evolutionary lesson and blithely spread seed to build the seed bank? I guess I’ve already answered that question above, discussing making my own disturbances with fire and grazing, so in a sense this is a question more of attitude and trust than method and experiment. Perhaps I just need to bravely spread seed and accept uncertain results. That may become part of the plan.

I assume that I am starting a step or two behind because the restoration was cropped for over a hundred years, and between erosion and crop chemicals, and even the basic fact that the wrong species of plants, were growing for those 100 years, I have probably lost the microbiota that I need. For three years I have been meaning to do experiments with bringing soil from the prairies over to the restoration to do experiments with “seeding” the microbiota. This year that has to happen. Information on this is needed and maybe I can do something to help prove (or disprove) the concept. The 20 acre Huggett restoration was a prairie yet in the 1970’s, so has only been farmed 40-50 years, and it spent half of that in grass during 20 years in CRP. I feel it is turning into a native prairie faster than the 100 acre restoration seeded three years earlier, which is a hint there may be something to this. Put soil seeding into the plan.

The numbers and the diversity of forbs in my native prairies I mention does not occur on every acre. There are significant areas of smooth brome through the valleys which approach monoculture, unlike the hill that I mentioned earlier. There are many ideas on how to fight this, but all come up against the wall of the competitive abilities of brome. Rhizomes with nodes every few inches intertwine below the ground, meaning that any activity that removes top growth, such as heavy grazing or a fire, simply releases inhibition at all those nodes which immediately send up an army of new shoots, making the elimination of topgrowth a minor setback. What has to be done is to use up that bud bank down below the ground on their rhizomes, and the way to do that is to keep taking the topgrowth away so that it repeatedly regrows without the opportunity to recharge. Burning is a start. Grazing the regrowth will then cause a third batch of buds to grow by which time we are in mid-summer when brome is less vigorous in the heat. If we can then come back to graze again in September and October when the brome growth resumes, we can perhaps thin it out enough so other plants have the biotic space to grow. That’s the opportunity that I hope to grab on the pasture that will be burned this spring. Nothing is ever free; that grazing will set back many things that I would rather not set back, but we will do our best to be careful. Again, add careful management of grazing the burn to the plan. Below is the type of valley that I am thinking about. All the shorter, gray grass is the brome. There are bits of big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) weaved in throughout, the taller rusty colored grass, which properly timed burns and grazing will help spread at the expense of the brome. This is an improvement that I desire. There are very few wildflowers, however, far less than in the picture shown earlier, and once again I struggle with how to reintroduce them. Experiments on a site like this are hopefully part of the plan.

Grazing is not an option on the 100 acres of original restoration, as it’s still in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) for the next two years, after which I give up the rental check from the government, but regain full ability to manage as I wish. In the meantime I hope to be able to document the vegetation much more accurately than the sloppy maps I have done in the past, which will make it easier to give guidance to those who will carry on the work when I can’t. Then, in 2027 the map can guide the paddocks we form in the 100 acres in preparation for 2028 when grazing will begin. Add that to the plan.

Central Point Prairies LLC received its own post earlier this year, so I won’t dwell on it. The goal is to have an operating agreement, the document which lays out the rules of governance and management of the LLC, completed in a couple months. At the same time we need to form one or more trusts to hold these LLC’s which will own our properties so that we are ready for an always uncertain future, As long as Linda and I are the sole voting members it will be easy to revisit it and make changes as we see snags or get new ideas. Work on this has begun, and it is the most important and necessary part of the 2026 plan. We have both built and lucked into an opportunity here that we need to grasp, with all the components of the plan and all the cooperating players assembled. Once again, this is the most important job of the year.

My original title for the post was “The Speculative 2026 Plan”. I often add qualifiers that are not needed. Of course it’s speculative; it hasn’t happened yet! It is unlikely that all these components will be completed to my satisfaction, and it is likely I’m missing a couple things that will come clear as the year occurs. However, it’s midwinter, and I’m not feeling confident, and part of me wanted to equivocate and add “weasel words”. Screw that! This is the plan, and I’ll do my damndest to fulfill it. Today is the shortest day of the year, a good time to move forward boldly. I will do that.

Appendix of probable species for plugs or whole plants dug out of my native prairie:

1. Downy Gentian (Gentiana puberulenta)
2. Wood Lily (Lilium pennsylvanicum)
3. Hoary Puccoon (Lithospermum canescens)
4. Bastard Toadflax (Comandra umbellata)
5. Nuttall’s Violet (Viola nuttallii)
6. Pincushion Cactus (Coryphantha vivipara)
7. Meadowsweet (Spirea alba)
8. Plains Muhly (Muhlenbergia cuspidata)
9. Green Milkweed (Asclepias viridiflora)
10. Early Figwort (Scrophularia lanceolata)

Revisiting the Ten Year Plan

This could just as easily be called “How Long, O Lord, How Long?” from the 13th psalm. David laments that he feels abandoned, though he closes with his trust in God’s faithfulness. My lament isn’t as poignant, nor will I expect an answer. We do not know the hour or the day, as they say. The question comes from the same well of doubt and angst, however. First, to give better context, I will give a little history.

As I’ve documented in a several previous posts, I was diagnosed with a very serious cancer 19 years ago, which was cured by basically beating the crap out of me. Since then I have spent a lot of time dealing with health issues of various types caused by the treatments. This culminated in a laryngectomy, where I traded the ability to speak for an enhanced ability to avoid pneumonia. It wasn’t exactly a straight up trade, there were draft picks and a player to be named later, so to speak, but the heart of the bargain was to trade my voice for a better chance to live longer. Seemed like a worthwhile trade, though I hesitated for several months. I am an extrovert who has always been defined by the spoken word, and it was a hard thing to give that up, but the trade went down just over 5 years ago. A while after the surgery I typed the aforementioned 10 year plan post, optimistic that I would be able to work on and improve the restorations for 10 more years.

Well, so far, so good. I made it through the first five, but I am afraid that less and less time and energy is being spent at the restorations. Energy and strength incrementally decrease. I will not tempt fate by laying out a multiyear agenda again. I accept that I live on the knife’s edge, and that a bad case of pneumonia, a fall (I have been diagnosed with osteoporosis in one hip and osteopenia everywhere), a car accident caused by my inability to turn my head to survey my surroundings, or perhaps some other yet unknown defect (I will have a heart exam around Christmas), could take my freedom from me. Rather, I will concentrate upon what I can do in the next year, and just try to be grateful if my body allows more. I will “Live in the now!” as Garth exclaimed to Wayne, in Wayne’s World. With that proclamation out of the way I will do a bit of a summary of what I saw this late summer and fall and let that lead to the plan for 2026, probably in a subsequent post.

My last post, written in early August discussed the results of the extremely dry winter and spring of 2024/2025, and some observations of what the return of bounteous rain had done for warm season plants. Below is an example fairly representative of mesic areas in the restoration from early September. While there are a lot of goldenrod blooms here, there aren’t as many species of blooming forbs as I had hoped to see. This probably was mostly a hangover from the early dry weather, but it could also be simple competition and succession. Many restorations have difficulties keeping forbs from disappearing under the relentless assault of the very competitive warm season grasses such as the big bluestem shown below. There were far fewer blooms visible of the various gayfeathers, asters, coneflowers, milkweeds, penstemons and onions that I hope to see, as well as a lot of other species. Was that real or just an artifact of the weather? The secondary question is: which species am I losing? If I am just losing some of the common wildflowers that were purchased for the original CRP seeding, seed that does not have a local history, such as horsemint, gray headed coneflower and maximillian sunflower, I would just chalk it up to a healthy succession, assuming that their place would be taken over by better adapted species from seed gathered locally. With the exception of the goldenrods, stiff sunflower, leadplant, canada milkvetch and heath aster, who all did well this year, I do not know yet if that is a fair assumption.

This brings us back to the 10 year plan, or really just the general hope for the future. What do I propose to do about it? How do I put a plan in place to continue to make progress on the goal of significant populations of locally adapted forbs, which I have christened “the living seed bank”, and how do I communicate the vagaries and nuances of the decision making to those who will continue the work? There might be a ten year plan that doesn’t include me. I have a different part of the restoration, a 20 acre piece called the Huggett land a half mile north that I will use as a salutary example.

The Huggett 20 was originally seeded in the fall of 2020 about the time I underwent the laryngectomy. It got many of the same species with the county drill as the original restoration, but more carefully chosen because of the experience I had gained from that restoration which was seeded in 2018. I worried over it, repeatedly spread gathered seed, along with some purchased seed with local provenance, and have somewhat obsessively managed it. Ben Lardy burned it last spring and we spread yet one more batch of gathered seed soon after. Unlike the 100 acre restoration, the Huggett land is either xeric or wet, with only small areas of mesic soil in between, most of which are dominated by canada thistle, none of which seemed promising the first three years. Results, however, are building into a really effective and fun restoration, just not one that looks like most restorations you would see.

Above is a pretty representative shot from late July of what the better parts of the gravelly, xeric hills that cover much of the piece look like. I’m ecstatic! The forb diversity is wonderful, probably 30 species just in this picture. I haven’t done a species list specifically for these 20 acres, something that I need to do this summer, but I’ll be pretty surprised if I don’t come up with over 100 species. We’ve grazed this lightly the past two springs, something we will likely do again this year, and again, it was burned and topdressed with seed in April this year, so there are new possibilities to come in the future. These soils were already starting to look good in 2024, but the burn and another year of development have really made a difference.

While xeric areas were already looking better in 2024, that was less true of the wetter soils, Some is so wet that I wasn’t able to spread or drill seed, but there are perhaps 5 wet mesic acres that I did seed, and I had been disappointed with the results and with the subsequent colonization with canada thistle. However, below is some of what I saw last September.

Above are mountain mint, swamp betony and a large patch of obedient plant. All were in areas on the wetter side of wet mesic, along with the thistles you can see in the foreground of the picture above. In addition there were a couple asters, a couple sunflower species, a tick trefoil, false sunflower, and the ubiquitous goldenrods. With the exception of the beautiful patch of obedient plant above, most doesn’t look that good from a distance, competing with both the thistles and the tall grasses, including invasive reed canary, but still not too damn bad, and a huge, pleasant surprise! I had a couple acres of the worst thistles mowed, and as an experiment Ben sprayed about an acre with Milestone herbicide to compare to the unsprayed thistles. Even in those patches, though, after mowing, you could see the basal leaves of a few forbs. As a whole these 20 acres are approaching the quality of the best part of the 100 acre restoration. Much of this is the result of Ben’s work. He has been there from the start, not just burning and controlling thistles, but gathering and spreading seed, and observing and documenting the results. In a sense, Ben is the ten year plan.

Finally I come to the other patch that was mowed, burned and topdressed with seed in late 2024, the “new” 20 acres. As the seeding was done in the fall there was a reasonable hope that I would see some new species establishing, if not blooming. Not a nugget, not a penny’s worth did I see. I couldn’t even find any pictures of those acres that I took last summer, probably because I was never inspired by what I saw. That doesn’t mean I will never see any results. Small, establishing plants are often cryptic little shits that are very easy to pass by. I had also transplanted perhaps a couple hundred seedling plugs of several forbs out there in 2023, the summer after the original seeding, and I find no trace of any of them. Maybe some were still there beneath the cover. Still, it’s a bit disappointing. I have to admit that at worst it will probably end up like a lot of restorations with a variety of common forbs and a bunch of thistles in a sea of big bluestem, which still provides a variety of ecosystem services – no disaster. However, my aspirations for this patch are far more grandiose. It’s young yet, however, going into it’s fourth growing season. Perhaps I just need to be patient. But, again, “How long, O Lord?” We go back to the beginning of this post. I may not have another 5 or 10 years to work on it.

2025 has been a very good year, nonetheless. I didn’t see the results that I wanted to see everywhere, but we can be a bit greedy, wanting everything to go our way. We think in short cuts; if we just do this or that then there will be an expected result. So much of our mood related to an activity is directly tied to our expectations. The name of this blog is Prairie Hopes, not Prairie Expectations. Hopes are more reasonable than expectations; though a person has to be careful that one doesn’t sneakily morph into the other. I was elated by Huggett’s this year partially because I really didn’t expect what I saw. Over the years I have simply done what I could and hoped for the best. On the other hand, some of my disappointment in what I saw at the new 20 acres was because I expected better. Between burning and seeding a lot of time, effort and money went into those 20 acres, and I expected a payback in results. So it goes.

I ended my blog summary of the last year with the thought that any year that I was on the top side of the ground, any year that I got to wander in the prairies, any year that I got to show my love to my family and all those around me, any year that I could still be a husband to Linda, was a very good year. I move forward into 2026 doubling down with that thought, which magnifies as I age and diminish. I will not make a long term plan, but neither will I fade away. I will make a plan for the next year which will show up in a new post soon.

A final shot of the summer’s discoveries. This is great blue lobelia. a short lived perennial that I have planted and seen regularly in the restoration. This picture isn’t from a restoration, however, but from one of my native pastures living on the edge of a slough. And it wasn’t alone; there were perhaps a couple hundred blooming along 100-200′ of the damp border of the slough. I had never seen one in any of my prairies before, but the combination of the conditions of the year, and the serendipity of being in the right place at the right time led me to a wonderful surprise. Now its compatriots in the restoration seem so much more important, as we can hope for some cross pollination and building a sort of “meta-population” of yet another of my prairie flowers, which then becomes an unexpected addition to the seed bank. You have to be out in the world to learn. You have to be in the game to score a goal. I want the opportunity to be back in the game to get a chance for the sort of glorious surprise we see in this picture. It is an inspiration as I look out at the blinding white of the landscape after a couple more inches of snow. Soon we will move on to 2026 and then a bit later it will be green again.

Summer 2025

As I begin this post, we have begun the month of August, so summer isn’t done yet, but here’s a little of the flavor of the year. The first picture is actually from 2024, when the old grain elevator, built about the time my father, Lester, was born in 1912 was dismantled. Note how clear and almost new the sidewalls look. That’s not an illusion of the light or photo editing. My grandfather at this point would have been about 45, with one of the largest and most prosperous farms in the county. When my nephew, Bryan, wandered around a couple years ago to see if there was any rustic wood to salvage he pulled a couple boards from the elevator to have a closer look. He went home, sanded the weathered surface, and his hunch that this was old growth cedar was confirmed. This was nothing like the “cedar chest cedar” you would buy now. This was dense hearty structural wood, in which you could see 50 growth rings in a single board. This wood was likely from a tree cut down in Oregon or Washington that was 6-7′ across, 150-200′ high, and 400-500 years old. Just as with redwoods, one reason that western red cedars can live for so long is the suite of chemicals it imbues in the wood to stave off insects and rot. My nephew got thousands of dollars of wood as judged by today’s prices, but there’s no way to put a price on the history of either the structure or the trees that went into the structure. They will become part of a new house he will have built in the Black Hills next year.

Bryan, who recently retired as a free-lance computer software consultant at the age of 58. laboriously removed the ring-shank nails (a style of nail put in to guarantee it would never come out), hauled the boards a trailer load at a time back to his present home in the Twin Cities, and is in the process of planing and sanding every board and larger dimension piece (mostly 2×6 supports). He will have earned every penny of value by the sweat of his brow. This seems a spectacular addition to everyone’s karma accounts: his, mine and maybe even my grandfathers’. It gives me the shivers to think that his (and maybe my) descendants will be sheltered by cedar hundreds of years old that had a 110 year long job of keeping the oats, barley and wheat that I shoveled out of trucks as a kid safe and dry. Very cool!!!! The last boards salvaged left the farm in July and this winter what is left (bin walls were cedar, but the rest of the wood was cheaper fir and even pine and was long past salvaging) will be pushed into a hole the renter will dig and be burned. And time marches on.

We now will begin the story of the summer. This year is a tale of two diametrically opposed patterns. A dry spell began about a year ago in early August and continued until about May 20. There were a couple fall rains, very little snow, and one measly inch of rain in April. Total precipitation during that period was perhaps 4-5″. Any plant that relied upon moisture from those 9 1/2 months, when normally there would be about 15″ of moisture was not in good shape. Native prairie plants that developed in this climate have developed several strategies for coping with dry spells, while trying to retain the ability to flourish when the rains finally come, but the general theme is “hunkering down”. In an earlier post I compared it to the business strategy of conserving working capital. Producing seed is metabolically and physiologically expensive. In essence, they are conservative with the resources they accumulate through photosynthesis, not wanting to waste them and then die. Below is an example of an old black samson (Echinacea angustifolia) plant that felt good enough to splurge with those resources to make eight seedheads in 2024, likely burning all the stored carbohydrates that it had made the past year or two. This year there were no blooms and no seed. The signal of the spring was to conserve resources and hope to make more carbohydrates to store for the future. Not every species can do this. Annuals and short lived perennials need to risk more to make seed; there is no other strategy. If you miss a year you are unlikely to get another chance to pass your genes on. However, many species are long lived enough that they can afford to be conservative. This has meant that for 25-30 spring growing species far fewer flowers were produced and there is very little seed to add to the seed bank or for us to gather.

Things changed dramatically in May. The rains began to fall, welcome and generous at first, and then excessive and onerous as time went on. I only keep a vague mental tally, but I think there has been close to 25” in the 11 weeks since the rain began. Four times we have received 3″ in a single rain. That 25″ is over a year’s worth of rain in 2 1/2 months. Why isn’t everything, like the black samson above, fixed up and blooming? Black samson blooms about July 1, by which time 10-12″ of rain had already fallen. It isn’t that easy, however. The “decision” to tell the meristimatic tissue (stem cells) to make reproductive structures is likely far in the past by late May. That seems to be the case with our friend the black samson, and was true for a group of other species. There was very little flowering and few seedheads of pasqueflower (Anemone patens), prairie smoke (Geum triflorum), textile onion (Allium textile), alumroot (Heuchera richardsonii), white penstemon (Penstemon albidus), breadroot scurfpea (Pediomelum esculentum), green milkweed (Asclepias viridiflora) and groundplum milkvetch (Astragalus crassicarpus). These were all species I wish to increase, and from which I hoped to gather seed, but I either ignored or gathered just a little to refresh my supply. For a while it appeared that I could take a year off of seed gathering. Not all plants initiate reproduction in April and May, however.

The picture below is of a small primrose, yellow sundrops, one of a suite of 20-25 xeric-adapted species that only grow in the less fertile environments where they have less competition. Many of those species grow early to beat the competition, but the sundrops is later, and just started blooming a couple weeks ago. There are many, and they seem to be making a lot of seed. I have never gathered it before as it is not easy to get much, and I have only found a couple plants in the restoration. This may be our opportunity.

Here’s another example, pale spiked lobelia (Lobelia spicata), This lobelia is a rhizomatous species, doing much of its reproduction clonally, without the need for seed. I’ve known about this patch for years, with a few blooming every 2-3 years. This year there are hundreds and hundreds blooming including on a nearby hill where I had never seen them. They are a delicate little plant, not looking as if they could compete in mesic soils with aggressive grasses. Obviously they do, probably in part due to spending some years building root reserves to the exclusion of flowers and seed. Even their seed is a small investment, with 900,000 to the ounce, The seeds are little more than dust that will blow in the wind in search of an opportunity. I may be able to gather far more this year than I have in the previous 5-7 years combined, and see if I can get them established in my restorations.

A final example of the year is stiff sunflower (Helianthus pauciflorus), a common wildflower of the area. Like the lobelia, stiff sunflower is rhizomatous, and, compared to many prairie species, widely adapted. It will grow in mesic soils, but also in my gravel hills. In most years there are blooms in the favorable growing areas and few or none across the hills. Below is a representative example of what many hills look like. Deer, cattle and other animals enjoy eating stiff sunflower heads (who doesn’t like to snack on sunflower seeds), but I will likely still have many to gather.

Finally. I have had the opportunity to host many people at our prairies this summer, including some of our advisory group, some relatives, a couple old friends and a new friend who is doing restoration work on land he owns in North Dakota. This all pales before my guest in the picture below. Lily turned 2 a couple weeks ago, the daughter of my younger daughter, Diane, and her husband, Ebi (short for Ebrahim). They live in the Twin Cities, a couple hundred miles east of here, and came out to visit a week ago. Lily fell asleep in her car seat on the way out to the prairies and was quite crabby to have her nap interrupted – until she got out to walk in the prairie. Lily was meant to live outside, and she was entranced with birds, butterflies, flowers and the vista of the land. A stated goal of ours is the preservation and continued management of our prairies for the benefit of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. That will likely only be relevant if each generation keeps a connection to the land. We have, and are continuing to do that with our daughters, and now we are starting to work with the next generation.

I’m about to turn 70, not that old, but with difficulties that could easily become debilitating or fatal. But I’m here now, dammit, still able to get around, and I got to show Lily the prairie, and earlier this summer, my older daughter’s kids, Agastya and Aashna. How can the universe allow such beauty as is evident in both the vista and the little girl? Why do we recognize such a thing? And why have I been allowed the incredible luck to share this with them? It’s hard to write much that carries my feelings here, both because those feelings are ineffable, and because I have tears in my eyes to think about it all. Yet I must keep steady and focused, because this is so important. I will not fail you, Lily, nor Agastya and Aashna. We will give you opportunities to see and learn and soak in the world, as we shepherd our little corner and find others to do the same after we can do no more. Then you can show your children and grandchildren what a prairie is, and what Linda and I have kept for you. I have been having issues with my back and shoulders, chronic problems begun by the cancer surgeries and the radiation that has allowed me these last 19 years of life. Yet when Lily looked up at me with a smile and outraised arms, there was no question of the result. I carried her the last couple hundred yards back to the car with joy only a grandparent can know. So far, I am as strong, as adaptable and as enduring as I have to be. And then tomorrow, we will see what more we can do.

Attention Must Be Paid

This is the seminal line from a soliloquy from Arthur Miller’s play , “Death of a Salesman”. spoken by the salesman’s wife at his wake, emphasizing the importance, and even the nobility, of average, flawed, struggling people. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart, but it would seem to have little to do with work on the restoration. Be patient; the relevance will become clearer later, but first a little summary of what has been going on the past few weeks.

Presently I am in the process of spreading seed on the two 20 acre areas that were burned last fall and this spring by my partner in management here, Ben Lardy. Below is a peek at how the fire went.

Pretty sedate looking burn, isn’t it? As you can see toward the top of the picture there was still some snow at the fenceline, and Ben had been here earlier with a friend to do some back burns in a few helpful areas. This was as safe and calm as a fire can be. I wandered around and took a few pictures, as Ben and his helper had it well in hand. However, as you will see below, it did the job.

This is on a pretty droughty soil, as indicated by the little stones everywhere, but it is likely more competitive below the surface with roots fighting for every drop of water available. Still, it is pretty obvious that most seed will hit soil, and will not get caught in the burned residue, with no chance of establishment. While there is more seed to spread yet, the majority has gone out in good shape and is just awaiting good fortune. Much of the bounty of seed we gathered last year went into what we spread here. Most of it was mixed up in small tubs, perhaps 5 or 6 batches of 8-10 gallons as shown below.

Some species are either too site-specific to put in a tub or too difficult to separate to blend, so those had to be seeded individually. Thus, species such as white penstemon (Penstemon albidus), standing milkvetch (Astragalus adsurgens) and textile onion (Allium textile) were only spread on the most xeric sites on south and west facing slopes of gravel hills, and downy gentian (Gentiana puberulenta) was only spread on north and east facing foot slopes. There are more of those individual seedings yet to go, but about 20 xeric tolerant wildflowers were mixed with some little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) to be generally spread over the hills. There are perhaps 15-20 more dry mesic to mesic adapted species to blend and spread over the saddles and swales next week when I get the chance. Finally, I am about 70% of the way through spreading the substantial amount of needle and thread we were able to gather last year, a laborious job because they wad up into an interconnected ball, their evolutionary strategy being to catch in the coat of whatever animal comes by and then, when they drop, to use their twisty awn to help screw themselves into the ground. You can see what I mean below, including the animal in the second picture..

In the end some went out before a few days of showers, and may yet get enough stratification to germinate this year; some didn’t, and will have to wait for next year to germinate, and some is yet to come out of their bags and containers to be spread. Optimistically, we can hope to see many new plants in the Huggett prairie, as well as the 20 acre restoration that was burned last fall and seeded last winter. The goals of this restoration, in addition to the usual litany of ecosystem services, include providing enhanced populations of the locally adapted genetics of as many of my native wildflowers as possible to create a living seed bank. We are doing our best.

And now, back to the title, which seems to have nothing to do with the text so far. “Attention must be paid!” The phrase is usually thought of in relation to the need to remember and honor our elders, people like me. It is often said that this is a culture that doesn’t respect age and instead honors youth, and I suppose there is something to that. My experience, however, is that young people are very ready to respect, honor and learn from their elders. Perhaps their elders just need to give them the opportunity. My lament has usually been twofold: first, that I lack the energy and time to fully transmit the experiences I have learned and the knowledge I have painfully gained; and second, that young people will only be able to learn those lessons by their own hard experience, the same way that I did. Is there any way to make straight the path for others and effectively communicate the lessons that I have learned?

Yes, attention must be paid, but I turn the responsibility back on folks my age. We need to pay attention to those a generation or two behind us, and not just our own children. I suggest that we elders aren’t always willing to put the time and resources into the delicate and critical job of helping the young learn. I think there may be more young people ready to listen than there are old people crafting ways to communicate in a manner that allows true learning. No one is going to learn much from just reading this blog, or from stories I might tell that I imagine will illuminate an issue. Yes, the young need to learn from their own experiences; I deeply believe that. Thus, more importantly, what I can do is to provide a canvas, in this case 200 acres of prairie restorations, a place and materials that they might not otherwise be able to access, so that they can learn on their own with fewer barriers and less risk. When that is added to the blog posts and the stories we might have something. That can be for Ben Lardy and for others who help me here; it can be for the young professionals we have invited to be on our advisory board; it can be for the students in the SDSU Native Plant Initiative Lab who might do research here and come immerse themselves in the restored prairies. And, of course, it can be for my daughters as well, and their children. Attention must be paid by people like me to young people to try to fill a few valleys and take the tops off a few hills so that their path includes the best opportunities to learn their own lessons. Such efforts won’t be wasted, whatever the results. It is a glorious path to follow, and a selfish task, as it is so rewarding for me to know, interact with and befriend them. If I’m lucky, they might even learn a few things while I have my fun. As I have written before, the glass is neither half empty nor half full; it is under the pitcher filling.

Central Point Prairies, LLC

Continuing on the theme of a recent post, the most likely path Linda and I will follow in the immediate future to provide a bridge to the far future is a limited liability corporation, an LLC, rather than jump straight to a 501(c)(e) nonprofit. A nonprofit would be like going straight into the deep end on future management of the prairies; we are likely to start in the wading pool with an LLC. That structure is easy to create, to manage, to create tax returns for and to bring in others to both ownership and management. It can become a nonprofit down the road, should we or our daughters decide that is the best path. Ostensibly it is a “for profit” entity, though the likelihood of profits is slim, and we will probably run it like a nonprofit. We can charge others for seed we gather, for hay we take off, for grazing or for other activities the land might be part of, and use that income to pay for management expenses in either format. Two differences between the two types of entity being that in the LLC any profit will be passed through to the owners every year on a K-1 form to be entered on their tax return, and that any money left over can be given to the owners as non-taxable distributions (all the tax having already been paid on the profit, as shown on the K-1), or it can just be kept as working capital that is used in the future. In my mind a third difference, however, is paramount: the land is still ours and can be passed down to our descendants. In a nonprofit the land belongs to the nonprofit entity. To me, this isn’t just a piece of land; it isn’t even just the land where I have worked to create a prairie restoration. Much of it is land that was broken out of prairie by my grandfather, starting 133 years ago. There is a deep history to respect. The future will begin as an LLC.

While the plan, stated before, and enlarged upon in the last blog post, is to have goals that would mostly fit a conservation nonprofit, it is worth digressing here into the crass subject of economics. None of my lofty idealism and dreams for the future mean anything without the income to pay the taxes, have liability insurance, pay for additional seed, and hire people to manage and work on the land. If I put the whole 587 acre farm into the LLC, not just the 267 acres that includes all the best native and restored prairies, that gets a lot easier, as it will include rent from the acres which are still farmed. It is still a worthwhile exercise, perhaps an extension of the whole concept of ecosystem services, to think about how we can fulfill all our other goals for the land and still make some money. First, the normal list of ecosystem services:

1. Erosion Control. Having this land in a permanent cover may not completely stop erosion, particularly on the gravel knobs which struggle to form a complete blanket of plant growth. It will, however, reduce it to almost nothing, and hopefully begin the slow process of rebuilding soil on the erodible hills.
2. Wildlife Habitat. In this neighborhood wildlife habitat is usually taken to mean pheasant habitat, or if a wetland, duck habitat. Thus, this could include access to hunting. Of course we are looking at this more expansively as habitat for everything from rodents to raptors to grassland songbirds. While most people don’t see arthropods as wildlife we need to add: 2a. Insect, and all Other LIttle Beings Habitat, more generally listed as Pollinator Habitat. We certainly want to support the bees and the butterflies, but also a lot of other life which is usually not looked at so fondly.
3. Water Quality. Perennial cover, plus the elimination of fertilizers, will not just mean less runoff, but cleaner runoff and water percolating to aquifers.
4. Carbon Sequestration. I devoted another post to this topic several years ago, so I will just mention that we have a set of points identified that we hope to monitor periodically to monitor carbon amounts, the second set of samples hopefully will be taken this fall to begin comparisons with those taken five years ago.
5. Education. We have been hosting a couple gatherings of various sorts here for several years, and this could become more of a focus, as well as the land potentially being used for university research projects.
6. Food and Fiber, and perhaps Energy. So far, the first two items are the only sources of income, from renting to neighboring farmers, but there are wind turbines within five miles.
7. *Supporting Services*. See below.
8. *Cultural Services*. See below.

Land is able to do much more than what is listed in the first six services, and we need to think expansively here, as we progress to finer distinctions in the general categories. In a recent post, “On to the Future”, and in several other posts, I have mentioned the concept of providing higher populations of as many species of native forbs, as well as less common grasses and sedges as possible, both to provide more stability to those populations, and to provide a source of seed for other restorations. This seed can be shared, donated or sold. At the same time we are providing the same service for insects and wildlife, providing higher populations that contribute to their stability. In a USDA site talking about ecosystem services these are called “supporting services”, “services that maintain fundamental ecosystem services”.

In the same list the USDA document then mentions “cultural services” which could include anything from birdwatching, dark sky gazing at the heavens, hosting a plein air painting gathering, photography, wildflower gathering, acting as a scenic backdrop to passing motorists, or perhaps just wandering in the prairie to bask in its beauty and find solace in its embrace. Long thought, and perhaps longer conversations need to go on to decide which of these items to attempt to monetize, and a way that might be done. There is no necessity or mandate, however, to monetize everything merely because of the LLC designation. Should a small camp be set up to engage in an ecotourism venture which could even double as a hunting camp? Should we invite guests willy nilly? Or should we concentrate on our relationship with SDSU and the seed/plant initiative? There are still many questions.

Such things don’t have to go into the establishing documents of an LLC, but they could. I know our daughters want some sort of management plan to guide activities, some of which can be written into those documents, some of which can just be in an addendum as suggestions. An LLC operating agreement can be modified with the agreement of the members of the LLC, whether during or after our involvement. This allows our attempts to “manage from the grave” to be modified, perhaps with a unanimous vote of the board.

Finally, the LLC can use both its resources and further investment from the partners to purchase other land to protect or restore. This would allow another party (such as one of our daughters, or perhaps even one of the board members) to contribute money to the LLC towards a purchase which would be rewarded with ownership shares in the LLC. There is adjoining land that would be very desirable to add to our prairies from the standpoint of both the conservation goals, and for making a better grazing unit, and while no opportunity seems imminent one could occur.

There is need for a third post in this series, which would establish a framework, or perhaps suggestions for what might go into those LLC documents, including a management plan. This may take a bit, but both Linda and I have been writing down ideas, probably very different ideas, on some things, so we have a head start. I give no promises when that post will occur, but will do my best. Till then, as the host of the “Freakonomics” podcast always ends his show: “Take care of yourself, and if you can, somebody else, too.”

Winter Seeding, Early March, 2025

I’m calling this winter seeding, but it should be with an asterisk, as there is no snow, and it was almost 50 degrees this afternoon. I will assume there is more winter coming, rather than this being the start of an early spring, but I am no longer confident in my knowledge of the seasons. Ten days ago there was a stretch of three or four days where the temperature did not get above zero, and now this, a sixty degree swing, a whiplash event. This will not be a profound or speculative post, rather a short documentation of my progress on seeding the twenty acres that were burned last fall, a task that I am not good at. I have been proclaiming that this is a spectacular opportunity to enhance the diversity and the depth of the wildflower component of this piece, originally seeded in November, 2022. I haven’t changed my mind, and here are some thoughts and some examples.

To begin, here’s an area I flagged to use as an experiment. First, I wanted an area of primarily black ground, with very little unburned thatch. These were the sorts of areas I was targeting for the seeds that I spread. Winds are fickle, and a well planned and executed toss of a handful of seed planned for a 10 mph wind becomes an unfortunate mistake if the gust becomes 15 mph, and perhaps changes direction by 20 or 30 degrees. The seed flies past the bare area into an area of heavy ground cover. Thus go the fortunes of war, so to speak. I was able, however, to get about 80% of the seed that I spread today, perhaps 10# of a mix I will enumerate below, into appropriately bare areas. Second, the area shown above has a significant area of Canada thistles which have colonized the existing seeding and are integral to the experiment, not unusual on this field. Third, I seeded the area, perhaps 200 square feet, with more seed than I was tossing out on the rest of the 20 acres. There is anecdotal evidence, including on other parts of my restoration, that Canada thistles are suppressed by a heavy forb component in a way that negates the need for chemical thistle control. Conversely, there is also plenty of evidence that little else will grow in a dense thistle patch. I have had that experience as well. In other words, it is a sort of race to see who dominates the site first, whether forb establishment can occur before the thistle patch gets too thick. Thus, I will be documenting both competitors in this area through periodic photos. I will try to give one of the competitors, the thistle, a handicap by periodic mowing of the area as the thistles come into bud. As the new wildflower seedlings will be very small this year, they should not be hindered by mowing. This will not be a rigorous research project, with multiple treatments and replications, meaning it will be just one more anecdote to throw on the pile. However, it will still be very interesting, and I will certainly use the results to inform future attempts to augment seed populations and diversity.

There is one additional conundrum here, an unknown I have not found in the fragmentary accounts I have read: Which forbs? Many species of plants, Canada thistles certainly included, fight for their space chemically. Allelopathic effects are very common, and can occur without much effect showing above ground, but many species of plants slowly undermine competitors under the ground making their targets susceptible to drought or disease. Again, this is not a replicated or well controlled research project. Still, I think it worthwhile to list the species of the mix that I spread.

1. Rough gayfeather (Liatris aspera)
2. Meadow gayfeather (Liatris ligustylis)
3. Leadplant (Amorpha canescens)
4. False sunflower (Heliopsis helianthoides)
5. Canada milkvetch (Astragalus canadensis)
6. Prairie onion (Allium stellatum)
7. Heart-leaf golden alexander (Zizia aptera)
8. Maximillian sunflower (Helianthus maximillianii)
9. Prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis)
10. Silky aster (Symphyotrichum sericeum)
11. New England aster (S. novae-angliae)

Obviously there are too many species there to sort out individual effects, but that’s what was spread on the rest of the mesic areas that I seeded today, so that’s what I used. If I am able to follow through with my experiment I will give an update in a few months. There are a couple other experiments that I hope to accomplish this year, and I will describe them if they occur. The day after I spread the seed the weather turned, with a little freezing drizzle, two inches of snow and 40 mph wind. In other words, the seeds were moistened, and stratification has begun. Today is still windy and cold, but there will once more be good conditions for spreading seed in a couple days, and I will try to make it out to fling some more possibilities onto the receptive ground. I have some big bluestem (Andropogon scoparius) to blend with white camas (Zigedenus elegans), more meadow blazing star, perhaps some more silky aster (Symphyotricum sericeum), a bit of an unknown mesic adapted aster that my wife gathered and likely some whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata) I gathered.

All this is in addition to the materials spread during a stretch of nice weather in December and early January. At that time I spread 50-60# of a wildflower blend gathered by my friend Levi Waddell with perhaps 40-50 different species, some of which duplicate the other seed that I have listed here (there were a lot of stems and bracts in the mix, so about 25-30# of seed). Ben spread several pounds of porcupine grass in mesic areas, I dropped several hundred bulblets of wild garlic (Allium canadense), and tried to individually toss a few hundred compassplant (Silphium laciniatum) seeds in appropriate spots at the same time. I spread a couple pounds of needle and thread (Heterostipa comata) on the xeric areas. I threw some bits of bottle gentian (Gentiana andrewsii) on a low area. And I have been giving the xeric third of the field bits of this and that: some prairie turnip (Pediomelum esculentum), Alumroot (Heuchera richardsonii), groundplum milkvetch (Astragalus crassicarpus), slender milkvetch (A. flexuosus), standing milkvetch (A. adsurgens), pasqueflower (Anemone patens), prairie smoke (Geum triflorum) and will add a little textile onion (Allium textile), prairie larkspur (Delphinium carolinianum) and green milkweed (Asclepias viridiflora) seeds to the gravelly soils if I get back out this weekend. I know that I am leaving out several species, but will add them to this post as I remember them. Then, in April I will decide if I put a little more seed out there, or view the canvas that has been “Jackson Pollocked” with seed with the satisfaction of a completed task, and begin work on the next seeding project. I already have the young cohort at the Native Plants Initiative lab at South Dakota State University tasked with starting about 400 plugs of various species, and they overwintered about 150 seedlings of downy gentian (Gentiana puberulenta) and pincushion cactus (Coryphantha vivipara) that I will try to plant in a few weeks.

Oh, but that is an exciting and enticing thought: Spring, glorious spring! As I age I get greedier for the yearly emergence of life to occur. Though I may last a while yet, I feel keenly that I am always on the knife’s edge. There are so many ways that I could become unable to enjoy the freedom of wandering in the prairies. The next season is getting close, though. Preparations for the party are underway, the invitations have been sent out, and in four or five weeks there will be pasqueflowers to celebrate.

On to the Future

This post will be exclusively devoted to what might happen down the road, meaning down the road after I am gone. While it will be specific to my home farm, the 587 acres where I grew up, and which houses the restorations and native prairies that this blog documents, it also contains the same ideas and processes that Linda and I are talking about regarding the 420 acres of native grass 35 miles east of here near the Minnesota border that are in a conservation grazing system she manages with about 90-100 cows. And, perhaps it may even include the 54 acres where we live, about halfway between, which has a creek bottom pasture, a little native grass and some woods by the creek. This is not a lot of land in comparison to a full time farming or ranching operation, but 1000 acres is still significant, and worthy of thought and care. This is the legacy we are leaving to our daughters, their children and further descendants, and really to the world. We now have permanent easements on all the native and restored prairies, about 720 acres, which is good, but who cares for it 20, 50, or even 250 years from now? Who makes sure the maximum ecosystem services and benefits will accrue to our family and to society? Can we manage from the grave, and do we want to?

Well, I think it’s getting clear we’re damn sure going to try. We’ve made a decent start at it, talking to a lot of people: lawyers, our accountant, philanthropy professionals at a couple nonprofits, and most importantly in my mind, a group of people with ties of various sorts to the conservation world, who I may describe another time. Other than the conservation/ecosystem services angle, the other things they all have in common is that they are entranced by prairies, that they are a lot younger than us, mostly about our two daughters ages, that they are both smart and motivated, that they have ties to this area making them likely to continue to live within a couple hundred miles of us, and that we respect and treasure our relationships with all of them greatly already. As I wrote in a recent post, the best, most logical legal structure will be worthless without good people behind it, but good people will be able to do wonderful things with an imperfect structure.

We do not plan to saddle them with a crappy structure, however, and the main topic of this post is the goals we want to accomplish when we create that structure. When I say “manage from the grave” I don’t mean micromanaging specific actions. Life is on fire; it changes both incrementally and in leaps. The whole purpose of finding good people is to have the ability to respond to those changes and ride forward to a better future when we are no longer here. What Linda and I can do to help that is to inform them about what we have done, the results we have gotten, both good and bad, and the outcomes we think are possible and desirable, and then to figure out a way to pay for it. It will include some specific management concerns and techniques we feel are integral to achieving those outcomes. Then, when we are gone, or just unable to be active participants in this, others can take over. But for now, in this post, we start with a list of goals. These are my goals as I define them now. They are not yet projected to be in the bylaws of an entity or a trust, but more of a first iteration of a learning process that can add, subtract, multiply or divide as seems best. Here goes:

Goal #1. To manage the land to maximize the ecosystem services and societal good that will be derived from it. This is the goal that dominates everything else. However, even this idealism is complicated. What services, where, and how does one “maximize” them? I’ve given the laundry list many times before in blog posts: wildlife habitat, pollinator habitat, water quality enhancement, carbon sequestration, erosion control and recreational land for everything from birdwatching to bird hunting to bird painting. A person can parse this down to finer distinctions and different terminology depending upon the author’s preference and the audience’s needs. For my farm, I can add a couple other important benefits as most of this is still a working farm: raising responsible beef and crops. We are definitely planning to raise food on almost every acre while still fulfilling our goals in all the other ecosystem services, Ultimately society needs it all. We will, however, add some specific items which fit within the rubric of ecosystem services:

1. Emphasize habitat composition and management with the Dakota skipper butterfly in mind. Since we have an endangered species that has been found here, we have and will continue to manage to enhance and expand habitat for skippers.
2. Attempt to aide the long term conservation of the native prairie plants, particularly the forbs/wildflowers that are found in my native prairies and other native prairies in this area. While none of the plants native to my prairies are endangered, I firmly believe that the local genetics, the local phenotypes that we see, are threatened by existing pasture management, and it should be important to establish and augment populations of as many species as possible by increasing populations and bringing in seed and plants from the surrounding area to provide a larger genetic pool.
3. To use this land and these plant populations as a sort of “living seed bank” which will be available to the larger conservation community, perhaps in conjunction with a traditional seed bank, both specific to this geographic/climatic region.
4. To use this farm, these 587 acres, as an educational hub, whether for conservation professionals, individuals involved in restorations, graduate students who might use the land for research projects, school groups, or the local community. It’s all good.
5. To consciously promote this farm as a site investigating the integration of farming and wildland/wildlife/native plant conservation.

Goal #2: We want to have the land continue in our family so our grandchildren’s grandchildren can continue to enjoy and perhaps engage in this work. This doesn’t preclude other ownership of some of the acres, such as creating a nonprofit based around these ideas which owns some or all of the land, or a formal collaboration with another organization such as South Dakota State University in a joint ownership, but it does put constraints upon other paths. As of now, we are not planning to donate the farm to any charity and then walk away, nor would we consider selling land to a for profit person or entity, no matter how well meaning their goals.

Goal #3: We want to create a management framework for the future which does not place undue burdens upon our daughters who have busy lives hundreds of miles away. Should they, their children, or even their more distant progeny wish to actively manage this down the road somewhere we need to find a way to leave that possibility open, but the goal is to create a structure able to continue effective management without the need for them to devote too much time or money. The work should be self-sustaining.

Goal #4: Once the first three goals are taken care of, any unallocated income not needed as working capital can be distributed to our heirs.

There’s my first list. I doubt it will be my last. Linda and our daughters will undoubtedly have other ideas, as may some of our advisors. As I said earlier, life is on fire, and undoubtedly there are problems and possibilities down the road that I do not envision which could change this, and we need to have mechanisms to do that. I feel a personal responsibility here, however, to make the best start that I can. This is the land my grandfather homesteaded, that my parents beat themselves up to hold on to and manage. This is the land I worked on and wandered in that contributed to the person I am today.

And the person I am today will be 70 soon, with enough existing and potential health issues to need both fingers and toes to count. I will not be any smarter, healthier, more energetic or more active in the future than I am today. We have responsibilities to our descendants, but also to society as a whole. We are citizens of the world, and I don’t shy away from that thought. We were lucky enough to be able to acquire and steward this land and we plan to do the best we can to fulfill those responsibilities. There are perpetual easements on over 300 acres of the 587 acres, on the native prairies and restorations (there are also easements on 410 of the 420 acres of native grass that Linda stewards). This should provide opportunities for others to enjoy and benefit from our efforts far into the future. This is a just the beginning of the work we need to do to provide the best chance for those descendants and others who may have an interest to immerse themselves in our prairies 20 or 50 or 250 years from now. One has to start somewhere, however, and the next steps await. We need to start creating the documents that flesh out a legal structure to help these efforts. I hope there is another blog post this winter discussing those next steps as they occurred. What was it that Buzz Lightyear said in Toy Story? “To Infinity and Beyond!!!!”