Category: <span>Speculations on Natural History</span>

Speculations on Natural History

When is enough enough?

Through the winter I have spent a lot of time trying to decide how much more seed I am going to try to spread on my prairie restoration. Here’s the history: The original seeding was done last June. As I’ve written about earlier, it soon became evident that the seed had bridged in the drill, and that perhaps half the seeding had no seed. About fifty acres would be nothing but weeds unless I reseeded.

Last fall, then, we spread seed over about 75 acres, only leaving the best 25 acres unseeded. Our process would have seemed haphazard to an observer. We would start with a purchased base mix, primarily grasses, different mixes for xeric, dry mesic and wet mesic sites, and then would blend in gathered seed, primarily forbs, from about forty different containers. Our choices of gathered seed would depend upon the soils to be seeded by the next hopper of seed. There were several tubs of both mesic and xeric forb mixtures, several pounds of black samson (Echinacea angustifolia), several bags of leadplant (Amorpha canescens), perhaps five pounds; smaller containers (2-4 gallons each) of 10-15 other forbs and then smaller and smaller containers of another 15-20 species. This last grouping included several bags of seed of species I purchased. In total there were about 75 species that had been gathered (though many in small amounts) and when added to what I had bought and the seed which had been seeded in June there were about 130 species. Most of the restoration had been seeded twice, and parts three times. I had spent over $40000 and invested perhaps 200 hours gathering seed. Why do I feel I have not done enough?

To be honest, part of this is just normal angst. I have spent a great deal of time and a great deal of capital, both financial and emotional, and so far I have little to show for it. None of the seed had gone through a stratification, so dormancy has only been overcome this winter. The mantra on all native seedings is “patience, patience, patience”. If I stop obsessing and go out there next summer I will be rewarded with a glorious vista of wildflowers. Right?

The trouble is that I know too much. I know the weaknesses and the failings of both the planning and the execution. Here are some of my concerns.

First, in order for the seeding plan to be approved, and for me to e eligible for yearly CRP payments, I needed to have an approved seeding plan. This was different for the pollinator habitat than for the wetland restoration (CP 23, for anyone who is interested). Through many iterations of seeding plans we tried to come up with some that 1) Fulfilled the requirements, 2) Were available from a local seedhouse at a reasonable price and 3) Didn’t make me gag when I imagined what the seeding would look like in 4-5 years.

That is not as easy as it sounds. Many of the cheaper, easier to establish species, such as yellow coneflower (Ratibida columnifera) or hoary vervain (Verbena stricta) which are used in pollinator seedings remind me of overgrazed pastures. Others such as Maximillian sunflower (Helianthus maximillianii) and wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) aren’t that common in my neighborhood. Still, price and availability means they were significant contributors to the seed mixes.

Many of the species I wanted to emphasize were very expensive: black samson, dotted gayfeather (Liatris punctate), northern bedstraw (Galium boreale) and buffalobean milkvetch (Astragalus crassicarpus) for example. Some, such as wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum), prairie larkspur (Delphinium virescens) and breadroot scurfpea (Pediomelum esculentum) were only available in tiny seed packets. And some, such as silverleaf scurfpea (Pediomelum argophyllum), slender milkvetch (Astragalus flexuosus) and hoary puccoon (Lithospermum canescens) were completely unavailable. Gathering these and many additional species was the only path forward, but the seed for the “official seeding” needed to bought as if nothing was to be added. Though my gathered seed was representative of the local prairie remnants and exquisitely adapted to the crappy soils and weather of my home farm they would not qualify to go into the official seeding. I was stuck planting a fair amount of forbs that I did not feel were appropriate to or representative of prairies in my area.

But I have gathered a great deal of local seed the past two years. I have obsessively watched which hills have the slender milkvetch and which have more wild onion (Allium stellatum), or the valley where prairie larkspur grow. Twenty acres of my native prairie were burned last spring, partly to enhance seed production for gathering. I have not been able to gather everything that I wanted, and certainly not in the quantities I desired, but I feel I have done well. And if some of what I bought isn’t well adapted, I comfort myself with the thought that there will be other plants to replace the laggards.

Second, as I have mentioned (whined about) earlier, half of the planting was not planted the first go-round. Most of the area that was well seeded was on a level, mesic area near the township road. The rest, including all the gravelly hills had seed spread last fall with an old pull type broadcast seeded pulled by an ATV. Even though most of the field was seeded twice, there is very little redundancy. In addition, the vagaries of weather and human frailty mean there were predictable skips last fall. Building redundancy into almost any system is both inefficient and comforting. You might say that I was efficient but I am not comforted.

My final concern is with the mixing of the seed. The biggest seeds are several hundred times as heavy as the smallest. Though we worked diligently to blend our mixes, the different sizes and shapes of the seeds we spread inevitably mean there was a sorting process as we bounced up and down the field. As we accept a lack of uniformity in a native stand I will accept a lack of uniformity in my seeding.

If this project is ultimately “all about me” as I believe it inevitably is, the question becomes: What will make me feel I have done the best that I can? What will comfort me with the thought that I have done all that I can reasonably do to create a viable restoration? I started a process to evaluate that question by going back over my purchased seed tags and my seed gathering notes to decide what species I felt short of. The concept is the same as triage: 1) Species I feel I have seeded in sufficient quantities 2) Species that are unavailable or frighteningly expensive, and 3) Species which I believe are under-represented, which I can afford and which come from a source near enough geographically to feel they have a chance to succeed. Another metaphor is that I am Goldilocks – you know the rest.

Of course, gathered seed is always welcome, and I hope to have a good year to gather prodigious amounts of locally adapted seed. I have a couple friends who are interested in the project and will probably hire some summer help who can supplement my efforts.

A short aside is that after years of hearing that only local seed should be used, I have now read a couple opinions that providing genetic diversity is a reasonable response to the changing climate. In my case that source might be as close as the neighborhood where I live, which is 800 feet lower in elevation than my restoration, and tends to more mesic soils. I have a couple small prairies where I can pick some seed from 10-20 species of interest and provide some diversity.

One could also say that I have already provided some of that diversity in my purchased seed, though I may be grasping at straws to feel better about the seed I have already bought. In any case, I will not be able to gather everything I want, and so I return to the point three paragraphs back: purchasing species which are under-represented and not frighteningly expensive

After perusing various seed sellers on the internet and visiting with my contact at Milborn Seeds in Brookings, South Dakota, I have come up with a list of about 20 species and have put together something like a business case for a seeding plan. My resources in money, time and energy are limited, as they always are, and I am trying to get the most bang for the buck in all three categories. In the end I will purchase small to moderate amounts of 10-15 species, try to keep the cost around $2500-3000, and hopefully spread this spring early enough to have a short stratification period, I have a good ATV with a new, small mounted spreader, and I can go around and through small amounts of snow. A 100 acre field looks like a continental expanse when working with such a small rig, but I’m not going to worry about covering every acre. I deeply believe in trying to create redundancy in the plans for any business project, and spreading more seed this spring will be a step in the right direction. Much of the seed I am spreading will probably be wasted because of its falling where existing plants are growing, but that is inevitable and to be expected. To believe that you can plan and execute a plan perfectly with no inefficiency is hubris and a path to disappointment. Slow establishment of my seeding means there will be more weed competition than I would like the next couple years. Even with two mowings last year I know plenty of weed seeds matured. Yet the soil is basically open, ready for colonization, and I humbly hope to do some good this spring. The next post will continue the story.

Speculations on Natural History

Restoration Blues

The last post was a big picture look at why I felt compelled to do a prairie restoration. This post will review the more immediate history and tell how I got to “now”.

There is a 37 acre field adjacent to the native hayland where Dakota skipper (Hesperae dacotae) butterflies were found. My family had not used this field in any way while I was growing up. It is hilly glacial outwash (glacial outwash is formed from the sand and gravel swept away by the water of a melting glacier), a terrible soil that was farmed for some time during the early 1900’s and then given up on. Eventually it was covered with quackgrass (Agropyron repens), which is how I remember it when I was a kid.

When my parents retired in 1979 (I was in grad school at that time), the farm was rented to a neighbor my age. I had been given an opportunity to take over the farm, but my Dad successfully talked me out of it. Eventually my parents asked David, the neighbor, if he wanted to farm the 37 acres, and he broke it out of the go-back sod. He farmed it for ten years or so, rarely raising much crop on the droughty soils, and was amenable when I told him I would like to enroll it in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). I then worked with the staff at the Day County Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to develop a seeding plan. We came up with a plan including five native grasses and four native forbs, and I was congratulated by several people for my “diverse” seeding. The field was seeded and the rainfall was kind. We got a good catch. The weeds were mowed a couple times, and by the end of the next year, 2012, we had a good stand that could be viewed as a big success.

Was I happy with my “almost” restoration? No. On the contrary, I was quite disappointed, especially after reflecting upon it two or three years later. The predictable result of most projects is that you learn many things through the course of completing the project that you really needed to know when you were planning the project. In this case, after reflection I decided the grass choices were fine. All five species : big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), green needlegrass (Nassela viridula), sideoats grama (Bouteluoa curtipendula), blue grama (Bouteluoa gracilis) and western wheatgrass (Pascopyrum smithii), are well represented, and are providing an excellent sod cover. I wish I had added three or four more species, but the choices were ok.

The problem is the forbs. Of my four choices: purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea), western yarrow (Achillea millefolium), Illinois bundleflower (Desmanthus illinoensis and purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) I am only happy with the prairie clover. The yarrow is a minor component of our prairies; the Illinois bundleflower is at the edge of its native range here, and all died during our first tough winter, and I got the wrong Echinacea species. Echinacea purpurea would be fine if I were doing a planting on good soil in Iowa; not so good on poor soil in northeast South Dakota. I needed to ask for black Samson, aka narrowleaf coneflower (Echinacea angustifolia) which is very hardy and ubiquitous throughout this area. I had ordered by the common name I grew up using, not the scientific name. The only consolation is that the E. purpurea has actually done well in some of the protected, wetter soils in the valleys of the field.

The advice I had gotten was useful if I wanted a reasonably priced seeding with a couple of neat wildflowers. What I came to realize was that I had blown an opportunity to do something more, something great. I attempted to topdress some new species a couple years after the original seeding, but by this time the grass sod was too competitive to allow entry to new seedlings. . I have yet to see a single plant from that supplementary seeding. My opportunity had passed.

Now we move forward to 2016 when I began planning to turn a 100 acre field nearby into a full prairie restoration. Once more I applied to enter the land in the CRP program, but like 99% of applicants, was turned down. The CRP program had covered 40,000,000 acres soon after it was authorized in the 1985 Farm Bill. It was designed primarily as a program to retire erodible land, but also as a supply management tool, reducing commodity surpluses. Over the subsequent 30 years it was reduced to 24,000,000 acres and had changed into an environmental program trying to accomplish everything from groundwater protection to wetland restoration to establishment of pollinator habitat. Thus my only path to CRP was to fit my land into one of the environmental titles. After reapplication I was to plant 69 acres of pollinator habitat and 31 acres of wetland protection.

With this in hand I went to work developing a seeding plan with Ben Lardy, a Pheasants Forever biologist working with the Day County Conservation District. I wanted to accomplish three goals:

  1. Do a kickass prairie restoration any Dakota skipper butterfly would love.
  2. Fulfill the CRP requirements so that I qualified for yearly rental payments and cost sharing of seeding expenses.
  3. Not go broke doing it.

I was fortunate to have the help of my daughter, Diane, a botanist, as well as Ben, a prairie enthusiast, in developing a seeding plan. With a determination to do much better than my previous CRP seeding, we went through many iterations of seeding plans, splitting the pollinator habitat into two mixes, one for the xeric hills and another for the dry mesic soils on the sidehills. Along with the wet mesic mix for the wetland protection area we ended up with three mixes of about 30 species each. With overlap it added up to about 55 species in all. Since a seed tag with purity and germination percentage was needed to fulfill the requirements of the CRP program, I purchased the seed from a local seedhouse, Milborns Seed in Brookings, South Dakota.

While this was already a reasonably diverse mix I then sourced small amounts of thirty more expensive species from Prairie Moon Seeds in Winona, Minnesota. During the late summer of 2017 I had also done some gathering of seeds from my prairies, much of it with my daughter’s help. Ben had also gathered seed from a dozen species, which I purchased, and when all was said and done we had about 110 species to put in. I had contracted with the Day County Conservation District to do the seeding with their grass drill and I was satisfied that we were ready to go. And now we cross over from the ”Prairie Dreams”, the title of the last blog post, to “Restoration Blues”, the title of this post.

By profession I am an agronomist, and I had made the herbicide recommendations on the soybean field we were planting into. I had recommended that David, the renter, spot-treat some patches of waterhemp with a 50% rate of Flexstar, a contact herbicide. However, there is some soil activity with Flexstar, and I had no clue as to the susceptibility of the 100+ native species we were going to plant. Thus, I reluctantly decided to delay seeding until spring to allow for the degradation of the herbicide.

The spring of 2018 was wet, delaying seeding. Areas of the field which would have seeded beautifully the fall before were too wet to seed until the middle of June. The conservation district was finally able to get the field seeded between June 15th and 20th, a month late, and now I just needed to be patient to see what would come up. Evaluation of a seeding like this is difficult. Native seedlings are very slow to germinate and develop, and many species need a cold, moist period of stratification to overcome dormancy, the main reason I had hoped to seed the field the fall before. Still the seeding was done, and I obsessively patrolled the field to see what would come up.

It was very disappointing. By August it was obvious that the seeding was very patchy. Perhaps 25% of the field looked good. Another 25% had scattered plants and would likely fill in with time. But 50%, 50 acres had nothing. The seed had obviously bridged in the seed tank, and large areas were bereft of seed, growing only weeds. I was crestfallen.

Here is what the best areas looked like.
Here is what the worst 30 ac looked like.

It seemed to me that I had three choices: 1.Petition to have it considered a failed seeding and start over. 2.Continue to monitor, hoping that I was premature in my assessment, or 3.Selectively reseed as I saw fit. I chose the last option as the one most likely to create a decent restoration.

As I stated earlier, I had gathered some seed the previous year and had already spread it on the field. I had also begun to gather some seed from my prairies during the summer, hoping to augment my seeding a bit. Starting in August, after realizing the dire situation my restoration was in, collecting seed became a second job, one I will elaborate upon in future posts. I enlisted various friends to help, and traveled to prairie remnants owned by friends to get species not available on my prairies. Ben Lardy gathers seed to sell, and I let him know that I would take whatever he gathered. As most of what was gathered was forbs, I then bought grass mixtures from Milborns Seed to mix with my gathered seed.

Finally, on three days in November Ben and I used my ATV to pull an old broadcast seeder to spread the seed. We tried to do 10 foot swaths across 75 acres without the benefit of GPS guidance, a bit of a hillbilly operation. One of us would pace off and mark swath width by standing in a visible place to give the ATV driver something to aim for, while the other drove like a bat out of hell, trying to drive straight while paralleling the tracks from the last seeding pass. It reminded me of striking out a new land with a moldboard plow when I was a kid; pick a landmark to drive towards and don’t think too much. The new age equivalent would be Zen archery; let the arrow find the target. If you try too hard to aim you are destined to screw things up.

We laid 30-40 containers of seed across our staging area, ranging from small envelopes to 40 gallon tubs, along with our bags of grass mixes. Each fill seeded 2.5-3 acres which allowed us to customize a new blend every 15 minutes. With winter looming and snow in the forecast we did not feel we had the time to carefully plan the needs of each fill. Rather we made up blends “by the seat of our pants” taking into account the soils that would be seeded by the next hopper of seed. I would dump in more black samson and dotted gayfeather (Liatris punctate) for a xeric area, leadplant (Amorpha canescens) and rough gayfeather (Liatris aspera) for dry mesic hillsides and Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum) and showy tick trefoil (Desmodium canadense) in the wet mesic soils. I had blends of gathered seed separated by site suitability. We tossed in whatever seemed appropriate like mad bakers, or cooks creating a mulligan’s stew. It seemed a cavalier way to work with the seed we had worked so many weeks to gather, but it was a lot of fun.

While things haven’t gone as planned I have done the best that I could do. I haven’t elaborated of all the extra seeding that was done, as various issues necessitated individual seeding of several species, and I know I have miles to go. There are some disappointments I will return to in future posts, but I feel good about the work that was done last fall. I am beginning to see some new seedlings from last November’s work. Now I am eager to continue to supplement what has become a restoration of 130 species and to see what grows. I want to play the last chord of “Restoration Blues” and reenter the world of “Prairie Dreams” again.

Speculations on Natural History

Prairie Dreams

I am a 63 year old businessman/farmer who decided to create a 100 acre prairie restoration in 2017. It was seeded last year, and has prompted a great deal of reflection and conversation which has culminated in the decision to start a blog to document the process and results, and to reflect on many things related to the restoration, and to prairies and the natural world. I do this primarily as an exercise to clarify my own thoughts and feelings, but if it is of interest to anyone I welcome your own thoughts, observations and ideas. And so we begin.

Prairie Dreams

When I was a teenager out picking rock or digging summer fallow there was a lot of time to daydream. A teenager lives so deep inside his own head that he needs a ladder to enter the world. Then, put that teenager in a job that takes no thought or intention and leave him alone for hours. Flights of fancy swirl and cycle, multiple iterations of whatever scenario has gotten stuck in his mind circle till an appropriate ending appears, and the successful/heroic/tragic scenario is perfect.

One of those recurring fantasies I had was imagining what heaven would be like. I must have had full confidence in my personal sanctity as it was obvious to me that heaven was my eventual destination. And to my 15 year old self, heaven would manifest itself in whatever form I wished, so the daydreaming task was to decide what manifestation best satisfied my desires. There were different answers on different days, but the one I remember the best was to be wandering the pre-European settlement prairie. There was nothing but five foot tall big bluestem to the horizon. I still can see the image of myself in a sea of grass.

Now I wonder if that memory has risen from my subconscious to inform my conscious brain’s desire to do a prairie restoration. I hadn’t remembered that daydream until recently, but I don’t think a memory or desire has to be conscious to drive thoughts and decisions. Our brains all have multiple drivers working simultaneously.

However, we still need to create a conscious narrative as well, if only to tell our friends and family. My younger daughter, Diane had surveyed and characterized prairies in northeast South Dakota for an MS thesis project, with special emphasis on prairies with a record of harboring Dakota skipper (Hesperae dacotae) butterflies. Though my land was outside of her study area I had a friend, Dennis Skadsen, scout my prairies and he found a Dakota skipper butterfly. The Dakota skipper has recently been listed as a threatened species, so I was thrilled. Restoring a prairie adjacent to one harboring a threatened prairie species might provide an extension of habitat that would allow a larger, more stable population to develop. Though no skippers have ever been found in a restored prairie, I doubt the sampling population of restored prairies next to skipper occupied habitat is very large, and a man can dream. And even if they cannot be tempted to feed on the black samson (Echinacea angustifolia) that I plant, there will at least be a buffer created between the occupied habitat and farmed ground. Few insecticides are used in my area, but infestations of grasshoppers, soybean aphids and other crop pests occur occasionally and a buffer from potential insecticide drift seems prudent.

To extend the reasoning, I am close to retirement with health problems related to collateral damage from cancer treatment. Increasing retirement income to supplement Social Security is a goal. The restoration is occurring on poor farm ground with below average rental income. I was able to enroll the field in the continuous Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) signup, primarily as pollinator habitat, at a rental rate above what I was receiving for it as farm ground. The CRP program also provides cost share for seeding, providing some help towards the substantial cost.

If I haven’t tied this up in a tight enough package there is a fourth benefit to me from the project. As I slow down in the career that I have been working at for almost 40 years I need something new to be moving towards. I have spent my entire life working outside. To retire to an east chair sounds more like the third circle of Hell in Dante’s “Inferno” than a goal to aspire to. Every week during the growing season for 38 years I have visited 25 farmer clients who are also some of my best friends. I need to have a chance to continue to interact with interesting people, talking about important things. I am rich in having a great many people to consult with on the restoration project; people I can ask questions of and hopefully brag to with pictures of my successes in its development. This will be a wonderful excuse to visit with them.

So the plan brings forth the subconscious memory of the wandering mind of a fifteen year old boy. It develops from the experiences chasing cattle, fixing fence and making hay in our prairies while growing up. The subconscious melds with the conscious desire to create a project to share with my daughter, something to look forward to working in and enjoying with her. It draws in the desire to support a threatened species and to still be a vital, contributing member of the human race. And I am doing it in such a way that it will support my and my wife’s retirement financially as well as spiritually. Art and commerce, science and industry, yin and yang. The circle may not be complete, but it begs the question, “How can I not do this?”

So I did. And I still am.

And this blog will follow the story.