I’ve alluded in the past to a new 20 acre restoration that I had planned to do. The planning is over now, as I was able to get it seeded the first week of November, right before I had my life changing surgery. You might say that this is the third iteration of a restoration that I have done, my third try at doing something great with the crappy soils on the west end of the farm where I grew up. My first attempt was a nine species planting made on 36 acres on the southeast side of Anderson Lake, a botched attempt if the goal was a prairie restoration. I just didn’t think big enough because I was mostly concerned with getting some cover over some unproductive, erodible farm ground. That was accomplished, but so much more could have been done. I have regretted my lack of vision ever since it was seeded and vowed to do better if I got another chance.

The second iteration was the 100 acres that most of this blog has been about. It’s still hard to evaluate its success after three years, as so much has been reseeded over the top of the original seeding. Actions that I take next summer, particularly on Canada thistle control, could mean the difference between something I am proud of and a project I have deep ambivalence about.

Still, much has gone right there. I have seen almost 100 of the 147 species that were seeded, including many that were gathered from my adjacent prairies. Many forbs that I really wanted to see are already common, such as slender penstemon, tall cinquefoil, black samson, alumroot and prairie onion. Others, such as pasqueflower, groundplum milkvetch and prairie smoke are more widely scattered, though I hope to find more in the future. It was a big undertaking though, and there were painful lessons learned.

And so we went forward with the third iteration . The Day County Conservation District brought up a drill and a base mix of 20-25 species was drilled over the entire site, and then the real fun began. I had purchased and gathered another 70 species, and spent two days spreading them over appropriate environments across the 20 acres. Some were combined in large enough quantities that my compatriot Ben Lardy and I were able to put them in a broadcast spreader and pull it around to appropriate areas. Much was spread by hand, which allowed us to get very specific as to where they went. At the end of the two days I was very satisfied that I had done my very best and was able to go to the hospital at peace with a project I had been working on for a year. Though parts of this have been written in past blog posts, it seems worthwhile to summarize the year’s work leading up to the seeding.

The first step was getting the land. The 20 acres is part of a 120 acre inholding in my home section that an uncle and aunt of mine originally owned, the north half of the northeast quarter of the northwest quarter. Shown on the maps above, it had been prairie when I was growing up. There was a trail across it to our 40 to the west, and I have clear memories of riding across native grass as we went to work on the west pasture. It was broken out of grass in the early 80’s, but there was a reason it had been left in prairie until then. It is a truly crappy piece of farmland, outwash gravel hills surrounding a waterway that seeps and makes the only decent soils unfarmable. It clearly should never have been broken. Thus, a big reason to do this is to right an old wrong, and while I can’t make it what it was I can still do the right thing, which is to do the best that I can.

The next step was to plan out the seeding and to gather as much native seed as possible to use in the restoration. I wrote a blog post in mid-summer lamenting the lack of seedheads this past year because of a warm, dry summer. Unfortunately, that didn’t change as summer turned to fall. In comparison to the previous wet year, there was perhaps 25-30% as much seed to gather. I supplemented that by gathering at some other prairies which weren’t as droughty, but in the end had to give in and buy more seed than I had originally planned. I did my best, though, repeatedly wandering over the hills on my farm, trying not to take every seed out there. Some species, such as porcupine grass, groundplum and blanketflower, I did well on. Others, like leadplant, prairie onion, silky aster, pasqueflower and whorled milkweed were almost total washouts. And, of course, that leaves many species in the middle, providing a significant amount of seed, but necessitating some purchases I hadn’t planned. Something that helped was that I had the pleasure of gathering three or four species on my 100 acre restoration that had grown from seed I had gathered in my prairies and spread there two or three years ago.

The field was in wheat last summer, but the wheat was so thin in a dry year that the straw was no problem. Here’s what we were seeding into.

And so we got to have our fun as early November gave us several sunny, beautiful days for work. That was two months ago, and very little precipitation has yet fallen , but the magic of a fall seeding is that we really don’t need much precipitation to begin the stratification process that most seeds need to overcome a natural dormancy. It wouldn’t make much evolutionary sense for seeds to germinate in October in the northern plains, so most seeds need a period of refrigeration, preferably with just a little moisture, to change their inherent reluctance to germinate and face the world. It is happening now.

Again one could say that this is my third try at a prairie restoration, so it is time to discuss what I have learned to make this better than the first two attempts. The first attempt was eight years ago on 36 acres on the section to the west. On the map above it would be just to the left, with only a small strip showing on the map. I seeded nine species, of which seven are still in the field. At the time, I was too cheap and had an inadequate vision of what could be realized. Then I went a little crazy on Iteration Two, the 100 acre restoration that was seeded three years ago. There are 147 species that were seeded there, but many species were seeded at such miniscule rates that I may never see them in the restoration, or the few scattered plants will fail to find pollination partners and die unloved. For that iteration, I gathered as much seed as I could locally, but I also purchased small packets of species that don’t occur in my prairies but have been found in my neighborhood.

As you may have already guessed, this is a Goldilocks situation, and I am searching for the answer that is “just right”. I don’t know if I found that, but I decided that I would try to seed significant quantities of every species that I was able to. And with a few exceptions I would only seed species that were already found in one of the adjacent native prairies. If only a few plants of a particular species are able to establish they will have compatriots nearby. This allows cross pollination to occur and will mean that those few plants may be able to make a contribution to the greater gene pool and to evolutionary development of the species locally.

This is also much easier to do on a 20 acre piece than on a 100 acre piece. When we were hand spreading seeds of individual species in November we could feel that we had covered the appropriate environments on the entire field. I took on too much when I tried to do a 100 acre restoration. There were practical reasons that drove that decision, but if the goal was to create a restoration which would have an intuitive connection to the native prairies nearby, it was too big. In the end what I have now in that field is a 40 acre restoration, along with a 40 acre diverse prairie seeding and a 20 acre grass planting that may be turned back into farmland eventually.

Going back to the idea of a lesson learned, what I learned meant that I didn’t try to do a second 20 acres. I will manage this 20 acres for a year or two, along with putting time into the 100 acre restoration, and then I can decide if the next 20 acres gets restored.

The third lesson was that more care needed to be taken with the seeding itself. The sloppiness of the manner in which the 100 acres was seeded will haunt me for the rest of my days. It necessitated multiple fixes which will never truly fix it. I hope to have the time, opportunity and physical stamina to spot treat the Canada thistles across the 100 acres this summer. It will be a Sisyphean task, perpetually rolling the boulder up the hill, but I will try. There will always be thistles in any perennial seeding in my area, but I hope to help the establishing forbs get the opportunity to get roots down. Much of the area is xeric enough that the thistles should be at a disadvantage once more drought tolerant species get a foothold.

And so I was able to set up a preferred fall seeding, rather than the late spring seeding date I was stuck with on the 100 acre restoration. A Truax drill was used, rather than the John Deere grain drill that caused the problems in seed distribution on the 100 acre restoration, and I was able to be there during the process, watching to see how everything went. It is still possible there will be bare areas because of drill malfunction, but not likely. This will hopefully make it less likely that the thistles get the same foothold on this seeding, as well facilitate erosion control. I have high expectations that I will be seeing some results by mid to late summer.

Finally, I think that I learned what I really want to accomplish with the restoration. More than anything else I want the restoration to be an extension of habitat for the plants and the attendant fauna that are adapted to the gravelly outwash hills of the area. Bigger picture ecosystem services such as water quality improvement and carbon sequestration come along for the ride. I really want to see more groundplum and maybe some prairie turnips. I want to see grasshopper sparrows and upland sandpipers. I want to see, God willing, a Dakota skipper butterfly nectaring on a black samson flower from seed that I gathered and spread. I want the 80 acres of existing prairie to grow and develop into 200 acres of prairie under the protective umbrella of the perpetual easement that I hope to put on the restorations. Much depends upon what I accomplish in the next few years to put things on the right track. And after that, forever is a long time that I humbly bow before.