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.