I write this in mid-December, a time when it can be hard to visualize spring returning. After a couple very easy winters we have returned to what used to be reality before our climate changed. It sucks. Still, all things pass, and though there has been some difficult driving already , roads are not building the type of lanes caused by snowplows that fill in with every breeze, and it got above freezing for a couple days last week. I’m thankful for that. Thus, I will pretend that spring is imminent and start to put ideas together for what I hope to accomplish next year.

The overarching umbrella shading all the hopes for the restorations now is the “living seed bank”, which I use to describe my attempts to create sizeable populations of as many of the native forbs (and a few grasses) of this area as possible, ideally becoming a one-stop shop for anyone desiring seed to increase for restorations in this geography. This will be populated by plants from my prairies, and augmented by plants derived from other prairies in this area, hopefully giving enough genetic variability to create a resilient population and avoid inbreeding. There is no gatherable species list that I would feel able to share with others yet, as the development of this seed bank is very much a work in progress, even as I enter the ninth year of working on these restorations, though I could probably give a short list of species that I feel there is good progress on. I have commented on this on many species in the two posts on “The Plants of Central Point Prairies”, but at some point I probably need to start a spreadsheet estimating populations and seed potential of every species in the prairies. Maybe I will return to that later this winter. For now, however, there are so many things that can be improved that fine tuning actions are not really needed. Here are some of my ideas I’m thinking through.

My first dilemma in all of this is how to get new seedlings started in existing restorations. Life fills spaces; it uses opportunities, and biotic space will be filled sooner rather than later. How do new plants establish in and among existing plants in the restorations, and in the native prairies as well. For the first two or three years of the restorations the spaces were not yet filled, or were filled with placeholders, if you will; annuals such as cheatgrass, foxtails and ragweed, biennials such as sand sage, sweetclover and weedy cinquefoils, and short-lived perennials such as dandelions and wormwood sage insinuated themselves into all the spaces. Even Canada thistle, an extremely competetive clonal perennial that drives me to distraction, is ultimately just a successional waystation. They are, at least, if there are enough of the better adapted perennial native plants getting going, ready to take the torch, so to speak, to move the planting forward to a prairie. It is not that easy to go from step one to step two to nirvana, however. New seeds don’t always turn into new plants. Those placeholders can fight to hold on to their place, making it very difficult for the supposedly logical succession to a stable composition of prairie plants to develop. This is especially true as the whole concept of a stable composition is a Jenga game sitting upon loose sand. Blocks are always moving in and out, and the edifice ready to crumble and rebuild into a new form. Stability is not easily attained, and perhaps not desirable.

In short, I have no idea what a “real prairie” should look like in my environment, and if I did, I wouldn’t know how to get there. What I know is a somewhat vague image of what I hope can be attained, and that image includes a lot more forbs from species already existing in my relict prairies. It seems a good outcome, and it is what I am working towards. This is difficult to accept sometimes, as I have those relict prairies staring me in the face every time I go out to my home farm. Those prairies are not a bad image to try to re-create, but I am coming to realize their limitations, as well as my limitations in re-creating them.

Which circles me back to my goal, the establishment of more of my native forbs, both from “my” prairies and from a host of nearby prairies, both in the restoration and, starting this year, in the relict prairies. In pursuit of that goal my partner Ben and I have spread a lot of seed the past two years over about 70 acres which were burned in three separate burns. We still have perhaps 10-20 pounds of additional gathered seed, along with whatever I am able to purchase this winter, ready to be added to what has already been spread on the two patches that were burned last year.

Or perhaps we will save that seed, and the seed we purchase, for the 20-25 acres of native pasture that we hope to burn this spring. On those acres we have the two disadvantages of getting new seed started on “old growth’ prairie, and of spreading seed in the spring rather than the fall, but we have the advantage that we can send a cowherd out after there is enough regrowth from the fire to graze. The cattle can stomp in the seed while holding down the established grasses. This is the beginning of the 2026 plan: execute a burn, spread seed, and bring the cows to help us out. Below is part of what we hope to burn. I was just out there and this flat area on top of a sandy hill has a fair amount of brome, but it is too droughty for the brome to take over. On this hill there are perhaps 10 grass species of which 8 are native, hopefully ready to move into the spaces occupied by the brome. In addition there are probably 40-50 species of wildflowers, most of which are priorities for me. I am really looking forward to what a burn and some timely grazing will do here. I am already starting to work on a seeding list for this.

Over the past several years we have planted a lot of seedling plugs of at least 30 species, and as far as I can see we have damn little to show for it. Some of it was bad luck with timing, but I think mostly it was the simple fact that the world is a tough, competitive place for a tender young seedling. Though there are likely more live plants resulting from those efforts than I have noticed, at most there are 200-300 plants from transplanting 2000 plugs. I don’t think that it has been worth the effort. I think my strategy going forward will simply be more careful and targeted seed spreading and placement, even to the point of individually placing larger seeds in areas with less competition. I’ve done some of that the past couple years, but hope to do more of the tedious job this year. Maybe some tedium will be good for my character. I will still start seedlings and plant plugs for species with very small amounts of seed, but will prepare sites more carefully and “baby” the little guys, which might be possible if I am planting 50 or 100 rather than 500. Thus, in addition to spreading seed on the burned areas, I hope to spend time placing seed more carefully, mostly those seeds belonging to species for which I have the most interest, and only planting seedling plugs I feel I can care for. I will put an appendix at the end of this post to list them. Put highly targeted seeding and planting into the plan.

Moving back to the restored prairies, here’s a little walk through the last few years in a pretty xeric area of the original restoration. The first picture is from late June in 2021, when I began to see some of the desired species establish. The second picture is from 2022, four years after planting, when I saw, more species fill in, and more of the ground covered. The third picture is from a little ways away, but on a similar soil on the same hill showing what it had become by last year, 2025, almost entirely filled in. The pictures are cherry picked of course, but are still instructive. This hill was also spread with more seed a year and a half ago after being burned, and I doubt we are seeing any plants from that seeding yet; the change we see is just established plants getting older and bigger. The question again is: How do I make an area with this much competition get better, adding all those forbs I want to add. Or, do the seeds spread over a year ago have the chance to improve it? Should I do more?

To start, I probably won’t worry too much about areas that look like the picture above, but much of the restoration is far less diverse. There is a higher proportion of grass in less diverse areas, which is competing both above and below ground with the forbs, and the potential new plants I hope to come from the seed that I spread. I have spent a lot of time in the past year looking at my native prairies to compare, wondering how the forbs compete and continue to reproduce, and have come up with several thoughts that are, in effect, creating the 2026 plan and probably future plans, not replacing the burn and spread idea put forth above, but rather grounding it in a hopefully solid theoretical framework.

First, the process of generations of wildflowers succeeding each other in untilled native prairie happens, it “works”. Else where did all this wonderful diversity in my prairies come from? In the 80 acres of native prairie I have many thousands of black samson (Echinacea angustifolia) plants, many thousands of prairie onion (Allium stellatum) plants, probably well over a thousand leadplant (Amorpha canescens), thousands of pasqueflower (Anemone patens), and the list goes on. If you add clonal plants like stiff sunflower (Helianthus pauciflorus) or bastard toadflax (Comandra umbellata) the number of individual shoots is impossible to estimate. New seed finds a way into the system to become new plants. How do I mimic the natural processes in the native prairies to help the seeds find a job?

Another meaning of the term “seed bank” is the store of seed in the ground that has been deposited over the past several years. As an example, an individual wildflower plant may make 100 viable seeds per year over a ten year lifespan, 1000 seeds. If, on average, only one of those seeds becomes a mature plant spreading its own seeds we have a stable population; if two of them make it we have an increasing population. All these species of forbs have an evolutionary history which has guided them to invest resources in a certain type and amount of seeds to make. If something causes our example plant to make only 50 seeds per year we may have a declining population. Though most of the seeds will fall where they will be unable to create a new member of their species, some fluke happening such as a fire, or a pocket gopher dirt mound, or the hoof of a bison (or cow), or a field mouse that gathers but doesn’t eat the seed will create an opening in that prairie that allows a new seedling to develop and procreate. It could be as simple as a lot of seed is good, and even more seed is better. Do I just trust that evolutionary lesson and blithely spread seed to build the seed bank? I guess I’ve already answered that question above, discussing making my own disturbances with fire and grazing, so in a sense this is a question more of attitude and trust than method and experiment. Perhaps I just need to bravely spread seed and accept uncertain results. That may become part of the plan.

I assume that I am starting a step or two behind because the restoration was cropped for over a hundred years, and between erosion and crop chemicals, and even the basic fact that the wrong species of plants, were growing for those 100 years, I have probably lost the microbiota that I need. For three years I have been meaning to do experiments with bringing soil from the prairies over to the restoration to do experiments with “seeding” the microbiota. This year that has to happen. Information on this is needed and maybe I can do something to help prove (or disprove) the concept. The 20 acre Huggett restoration was a prairie yet in the 1970’s, so has only been farmed 40-50 years, and it spent half of that in grass during 20 years in CRP. I feel it is turning into a native prairie faster than the 100 acre restoration seeded three years earlier, which is a hint there may be something to this. Put soil seeding into the plan.

The numbers and the diversity of forbs in my native prairies I mention does not occur on every acre. There are significant areas of smooth brome through the valleys which approach monoculture, unlike the hill that I mentioned earlier. There are many ideas on how to fight this, but all come up against the wall of the competitive abilities of brome. Rhizomes with nodes every few inches intertwine below the ground, meaning that any activity that removes top growth, such as heavy grazing or a fire, simply releases inhibition at all those nodes which immediately send up an army of new shoots, making the elimination of topgrowth a minor setback. What has to be done is to use up that bud bank down below the ground on their rhizomes, and the way to do that is to keep taking the topgrowth away so that it repeatedly regrows without the opportunity to recharge. Burning is a start. Grazing the regrowth will then cause a third batch of buds to grow by which time we are in mid-summer when brome is less vigorous in the heat. If we can then come back to graze again in September and October when the brome growth resumes, we can perhaps thin it out enough so other plants have the biotic space to grow. That’s the opportunity that I hope to grab on the pasture that will be burned this spring. Nothing is ever free; that grazing will set back many things that I would rather not set back, but we will do our best to be careful. Again, add careful management of grazing the burn to the plan. Below is the type of valley that I am thinking about. All the shorter, gray grass is the brome. There are bits of big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) weaved in throughout, the taller rusty colored grass, which properly timed burns and grazing will help spread at the expense of the brome. This is an improvement that I desire. There are very few wildflowers, however, far less than in the picture shown earlier, and once again I struggle with how to reintroduce them. Experiments on a site like this are hopefully part of the plan.

Grazing is not an option on the 100 acres of original restoration, as it’s still in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) for the next two years, after which I give up the rental check from the government, but regain full ability to manage as I wish. In the meantime I hope to be able to document the vegetation much more accurately than the sloppy maps I have done in the past, which will make it easier to give guidance to those who will carry on the work when I can’t. Then, in 2027 the map can guide the paddocks we form in the 100 acres in preparation for 2028 when grazing will begin. Add that to the plan.

Central Point Prairies LLC received its own post earlier this year, so I won’t dwell on it. The goal is to have an operating agreement, the document which lays out the rules of governance and management of the LLC, completed in a couple months. At the same time we need to form one or more trusts to hold these LLC’s which will own our properties so that we are ready for an always uncertain future, As long as Linda and I are the sole voting members it will be easy to revisit it and make changes as we see snags or get new ideas. Work on this has begun, and it is the most important and necessary part of the 2026 plan. We have both built and lucked into an opportunity here that we need to grasp, with all the components of the plan and all the cooperating players assembled. Once again, this is the most important job of the year.

My original title for the post was “The Speculative 2026 Plan”. I often add qualifiers that are not needed. Of course it’s speculative; it hasn’t happened yet! It is unlikely that all these components will be completed to my satisfaction, and it is likely I’m missing a couple things that will come clear as the year occurs. However, it’s midwinter, and I’m not feeling confident, and part of me wanted to equivocate and add “weasel words”. Screw that! This is the plan, and I’ll do my damndest to fulfill it. Today is the shortest day of the year, a good time to move forward boldly. I will do that.

Appendix of probable species for plugs or whole plants dug out of my native prairie:

1. Downy Gentian (Gentiana puberulenta)
2. Wood Lily (Lilium pennsylvanicum)
3. Hoary Puccoon (Lithospermum canescens)
4. Bastard Toadflax (Comandra umbellata)
5. Nuttall’s Violet (Viola nuttallii)
6. Pincushion Cactus (Coryphantha vivipara)
7. Meadowsweet (Spirea alba)
8. Plains Muhly (Muhlenbergia cuspidata)
9. Green Milkweed (Asclepias viridiflora)
10. Early Figwort (Scrophularia lanceolata)