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 15^th and 20^th, 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.

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.