It has now been three years since the original seeding on the restoration and this will be an update and documentation of where we are now, July 1, 2021. I was heartbroken observing the seeding the first fall in October, 2018, as it was obvious that 80-90% of the seed had ended up on about half the seeding. Providentially, I had been gathering seed all that year, a year with good seed production, and mixed that with several thousand dollars worth of seed that I purchased to spread. Before I talk more about that, this is probably a good time to resurrect the map of the seeding I made that fall evaluating what had happened and what I hoped to do about it.

Zone 1 is the area where almost all the seed dropped during the original seeding. It’s an area of gently rolling, silt to sandy loam soils, fairly mesic, and most of it has a dense stand of the 30 species that went into the seed mix approved by the NRCS. It is literally jam packed with all the cheap, adaptable species which fill up pollinator plots all over the Dakotas and Minnesota. Maximillian sunflower, yellow coneflower, brown eyed susan, blanketflower, gray headed coneflower, horsemint, new england aster, yarrow, purple praire clover, false sunflower, golden alexander, hoary vervain, canada milkvetch, shell leaf penstemon and a few more forbs join with eight or ten grasses to make what looks like a wonderful restoration. And as packed with plants as it is I have spread very little additional seed on this area. Here’s a couple views of what it looks like right now, the last week of June.

There’s more Canada thistles than I would like to see, a few patches of which I am spraying with Milestone herbicide to allow at least the grasses to compete for the space. But this was basically beyond helping with additional seed by the first fall. Does this provide the ecological services I hope the restoration provides? Welllll, some of them. It certainly provides food for pollinators; its in a bit of a lull between the early bloomers and the mid summer blooms, but there is a lot of pollen and nectar produced here. It will sequester carbon like a bandit, and provides wonderful ground cover for a lot of life. What’s not to like? We will put that discussion off until we get to Zone 3.

But first to Zone 2. Generally Zone 2 is in more xeric soils than the silt loam of Zone 1. It got a reasonable seeding rate, probably about what it was supposed to get. Two years ago it looked a bit barren compared to Zone 1, but as more seed has germinated (and we have probably lost some of the excess plants from Zone 1) it has come to look just fine. Here’s a couple images.

Because there was much more room for additional seedlings fall of 2018, almost all of Zone 2 got the full component of gathered and purchased seed spread over the top as a second seeding, and we have a smattering of local genotypes in with the bulk of the purchased seed. I am pleased with most of this area, which will look a lot different in a couple years as the bunchgrasses expand their footprint and most of the ground surface gets cover. Species I see in this zone for which I gathered the seed include tall cinquefoil (Drymocallis arguta), downy painted cup (Castilleja sessiflora), black samson (Echinacea angustifolia), prairie onion (Allium stellatum) and alumroot (Heuchera richardsonii). Hopefully more to come as I continue watching.

We now skip to Zone 4, which was a fiasco from the beginning. Almost no seed was dropped on 20-25 acres, and the entire area was Canada thistle which blew over from the neighbor to the south. There was really no choice other than a total re-set, so I have eliminated the thistles with two broadcast herbicide treatments and have respread a mix of grasses to establish cover. Once more, a couple pictures.

I guess that I should be happy that this looks as good as it does. In the spring of 2019 after being in the ground for a year there were very widely spaced perennial grasses, perhaps one/10 square feet and almost no forbs from my seeding. There were, however Canadian thistles over almost every square inch of the 20-25 acres. It was terribly discouraging, but my experience as an agronomist kicked in, and I realized that the thistles would allow nothing else to establish, and almost certainly cause the seeding to be considered a failure by the NRCS, stopping CRP payments. The only choice was to start over, so another batch of seed, 95% grass, was spread in the fall of 2019, and the first of two herbicide treatments was applied. Canada thistle creates an enormous bud bank below the surface, and you have to win a war of attrition. So over three years this has been mowed five or six times, and sprayed twice with different herbicides, and it is turning into a diverse field of native grasses. Along with the big bluestem, Indiangrass, western wheatgrass, Canada wildrye and switchgrass, we have sideoats grama, slender wheatgrass, prairie junegrass and some porcupine grass which was hand spread from gathered seed. There are even a few hardy forbs, as seen above, notably golden alexanders which are remarkably tolerant to the herbicides I have used. Earlier this spring I experimented with spreading some new forb seed over part of Zone 4, and if it looks worthwhile I will likely do more this fall.

But where are we sitting on the question of ecosystem services? Not great. Erosion control and water purification are covered, and it acts as a buffer from pesticide applications that are occasionally made on the cropped field to the east. Carbon sequestration is partially covered, though would be a lot better if there were still some legumes to feed nitrogen into the system. No pollinator habitat; and no habitat for lots of little critters that want a diverse herbaceous buffet and landscape to live in. And Zone 4 makes no contribution to the two specific overriding goals I want my restoration to accomplish: It provides little for the Dakota skipper butterfly and it does not contribute to the preservation and spread of the local plant genotypes. Which brings us to Zone 3.

What all these pictures have in common is their forb diversity. All this occurs on perhaps 20-25 acres of very xeric hillsides, some almost bereft of anything recognizable as soil. There would be very little overburden to remove should we wish to turn this into a gravel mine. The diversity is fairly evenly split between species which were either seeded in the original seeding or broadcast from purchased seed that fall, and species from which I gathered the seed in my adjoining native prairie. Several species that I gathered have become some of the dominant contributors to my restoration, notably slender penstemon (Penstemon gracilis), tall cinquefoil, downy painted cup (Castilleja sessiflora) and black samson, but there are many others. Most of this zone has been spread with seed 4 separate times. My hope had been to increase the range for local genotypes of my prairie species, and I have been able to do that for 20-25 species. This pleases me greatly. After three years I have seen three species for the first time this spring, slender milkvetch (Astragalus flexuosus), prairie turnip (Pediomelum escusenta) and leadplant (Amorpha canescens). This gives me hope of yet seeing some of the dozen or so species for which I gathered and spread seed with no visible results yet.

Pollinator activity in these areas is ubiquitous, and the number of black samson I have blooming out there gives me hope that we may even find a Dakota skipper butterfly out there someday slurping up some nectar. This still doesn’t look anything like the native prairies in the area, but there are solid bones to grow on. This is what I envisioned when I dreamed of my restoration, and on a few acres my dreams came true.