When I was planning for seeding a 20 acre patch of restored prairie last fall I wrote a blog post entitled “The New Restoration”, detailing what my ideas were to make this new project a wonderful prairie restoration by incorporating the lessons from earlier work. This I tried to do, and the restoration was seeded in early November of 2020, with a base mix put in by the local Conservation District with a Truax drill, and a significant amount of gathered seed spread over the top, broadcast both with a spinner spreader and by hand. Immediately after completing the seeding I had a big surgery, a laryngectomy, to which I lost my entire winter in recovery and therapy. So it was with great anticipation that I went to the field in late April, but all I saw coming up were areas of thick cheatgrass. This was a bit disappointing, but not really unexpected considering the history of the field. Cheat is crazy competitive, so I lined up the neighbor to spray Roundup to kill the cheat before any of the seeds from the restoration seeding germinated. My hopes ran high.

As the spring progressed, a very dry winter turned into a very dry spring and early summer, so I was patient until we finally had a good rain in early June. What appeared after the rain was not a carpet of prairie flowers, but a thick carpet of yellow foxtail, a weedy, annual grass. Weeds are certainly expected in any restoration, and at first this didn’t concern me very much, but as June progressed I became more worried. The foxtail was extremely thick, to the point of precluding all other growth over most of the field, and it was dry enough to wonder how any new seedling could compete with the annual grass carpet. In droughty soils which are often planted to wheat this foxtail seed bank is a common phenomena; the lack of competition in mid-late summer from a thin (because of the poor soils) maturing wheat crop almost invariably allows foxtails to proliferate and make lots of seed right before the wheat is harvested. I could have attempted to combat this by fallowing the field for a year before seeding the restoration and attempting not to allow any weeds to go to seed, thus hoping to limit the amount of weed competition the subsequent year. However, that is not an easy task, as life always seems to find a way, so I now had a decision to make. Very little of my planting had yet germinated, as I only saw a few cool season perennial grass seedlings; but new seedlings of many species are very cryptic, and I might have more out there than I thought.

I decided to trust 40 years of agronomic experience and to have another herbicide application made, this one specific to grasses, and to hope that the perennial grass seedlings that I knew I would be killing (primarily wheatgrasses and green needlegrass which had germinated in the June rain) would be replaced by plenty of brothers and sisters later. The application would spare any dicots, whether weeds or wildflowers, so this didn’t affect my plans to mow the restoration twice later in the summer. My hopes were still high, but tempered with the realization that I was killing some plants that I didn’t want to kill. And the summer sped on.

Or at least it sped on for those who enjoy warm, sunny days at the beach. If you are a farmer, or a seed hoping to germinate, the endless days of sunshine and 90 degrees were a millstone around the neck, a trial to be endured. While this was certainly not a drought of historic proportions, it was damned hot and dry. The wheat crop withered, the pasture grasses turned brown and it was looking like a bad year for my restoration to be starting. I remember going up and down the hills in early August and searching in vain for seedlings that I was responsible for seeding. While I was confident that many of the seeds would be there for next year, I still would have felt much better had I felt I was achieving some cover over the erosive hills. I was starting to regret my second herbicide application, and my hope was wavering.

Any average hides the fact that it is simply the mathematical mean of what might be wildly disparate inputs, a mean of extremes. And so it was this year. When the year ends the records will show a rainfall total for 2021 slightly above average for the 130 years that measurements have been taken. In that average year almost half the rain falls from May 1 through the end of July. This year we had less than half our average rainfall during that period, but then almost 300% of our average precipitation during August, September and October, normally drier months. Any rainy spell is often casually referred to as a “monsoon”, but the term refers to a specific phenomena of moisture flowing on winds induced by the differential heating of land and water. The rising air caused by the heating of the ground draws in cooler, moisture-laden air from over the ocean. The Indian subcontinent famously has the summer monsoon (My daughter was married in Goa, on the west coast of India, in July several years ago, and it was as if the gods were dumping buckets from the heavens. It wasn’t like the thunderstorms that I was accustomed to; it was more like a direct transfer of those buckets being lifted from the Arabian Sea to our west, and then pouring out as a warm, if overwhelming, shower to rinse away the sweat that dripped from our bodies in the incredible humidity), but the southwest United States has a monsoon as well, and sometimes the winds bring those rains as far as South Dakota. When that contribution was added to an abnormally busy traditional late summer rain regime we ended up with almost 20″ of rain in a little over three months, much more rain than we had received in the previous 12 months. What were the effects of all this water?

What had been a wasteland was transformed into a nursery. Of course, not all the plants were desirable, as the pictures all show; the sun shines and the rain falls on saint and sinner alike; but by early October I could find at least a couple native perennial seedlings per square foot almost everywhere I went. In the meantime I had already ordered a supply of seed, primarily grasses, to blend with all my gathered forbs to “salvage” the restoration. Though I have so far been unable to get much spread I still have hopes for an opportunity. However, if I am unable to get to the field because the grass trail I use to access it is blocked with snow I will feel that there is already a fine start to the restoration. I believe in redundancy, and to waste some seed on the areas which are well stocked with young plants in order to help areas less well stocked will feel fine.

As always there is a bit of “cherry picking” to make sure the prettiest pictures get in the blog, but there are a lot of new seedlings that germinated during the wet spell that began in early August. Dormancies of all kinds had undoubtedly been overcome, and I just hope that there was sufficient time for those seedlings to establish crowns so they can overwinter. The main reason for seed dormancy is so that seedlings don’t start too late in the fall, but rather wait for the next spring, and it is possible that some started too late this fall. So if I am able I will broadcast another batch of seed this week and some of those will perhaps be there ready to germinate as reinforcements next spring. And once more, as I enter my 67th year, I also will await spring. As I get older and accumulate more physical ailments the waiting becomes more poignant, the anticipation sharper and the coming of new life in April sweeter. Every season is more likely than the last to be the final time I can envelop myself in the prairie and be at home. But mindfulness demands my attention to the arc of this year, to November of 2021, and so I will try to finish it on a high note with the accomplishment of spreading the additional seed. Perhaps I can even find an opportunity to wander a bit in the hills before the weather shuts me down. It will make the waiting easier to know that I didn’t waste November.

POSTSCRIPT: Today (November 19) a retired friend came out to help me topdress seed. We walked repeatedly up and down the field and hand spread mixtures of purchased and gathered seed across the 20 acres, each of us walking perhaps five miles trying to do a good job. Though I am sure we missed some areas, with the help of a 15 mph crosswind I think that most of the field got some additional seed. A flock of horned larks was certainly interested in the new food source, but I have very high hopes that some of that seed will evade their grasp to germinate next spring and summer and add depth to the restoration. I am very tired and sore this evening and very happy.