I spent a couple hours yesterday walking around the restoration to spread some grass seed and ponder future management. It’s been a year since the original seeding and the results are coming into better focus. When I evaluated it last fall I felt that bridging in the tank of the drill that did the seeding left 50 acres, or half the field without seed, and only 25-30 acres well seeded (leaving the other 20-25 acres poorly seeded I guess). Further development and perhaps a more objective eye whittles the empty area down to maybe 20-25 acres and raises the better area to 50 acres. Time, and some help from the supplementary seeding that Ben Lardy and I did last fall have provided some encouragement. Still, there is a significant area that doesn’t look good. It is nowhere close to providing any of the ecological services that it has been my goal to provide. How do I make these 25 acres not suck? Therein lies what is becoming an existential dilemma.

To illustrate my concerns I stood on a bare knob and took pictures in all directions. Here is what I saw:

Most of what can be seen is wormwood sage and marestail; go down the hill and we can add canada thistle, tall waterhemp and a variety of other weed species. Native perennial density varies from one plant per square foot down to one plant per 50 square feet. By any objective measurement this substantial part of the restoration truly does suck. What can be done?

Well, to begin with we have now seeded this area three more times in addition to the first seeding. We pulled a spreader over all of it last November, and then again about the first of May. Since then I (with some help from a couple hard working young women who are helping my wife and I out this summer) have spread supplemental grass and forb seed by hand over most of the area. Every time I think I am done I find myself ready to turn around to buy and gather more seed before I finish the thought. On these gravelly hills I have one more year to augment the seed bank and hopefully add some substance and depth to the restoration. There is still a place at the table, open spots for seedlings to colonize. In the valleys the weeds are thicker and more competitive, but I still hope that there is room there as well for seed spread later this year to have a chance. The fallback position is to start over, and with $500-600 per acre and countless hours of seed gathering invested I am not ready to do that. I also hope to get out there with a sprayer on the ATV to start doing some targeted control, though I know how difficult that will be. One can go crazy trying to control weeds in a situation like this. And finally, I will soon have a neighbor go across this with a mower.

The dream is that I will see a crescendo of seedling establishment building through the entire summer as all the seeds we have spread on the field (perhaps 30-40 seeds/ft2) break dormancy and begin to establish. In the dichotomy of optimists and pessimists I stand firmly holding a glass half full (and am always tempted to say it’s two thirds full). A lifetime of watching the world, however, prompts me to have a Plan C should my optimism be unfounded (Plan B has already been completed), and I am getting close to having plan C decided. In the meantime I will obsessively monitor the seeding and continue to collect seed from my existing prairies. I will end with a couple pictures to illustrate why I am optimistic.

The pictures above show areas that I evaluated as having very poor stands last summer. It is still not a snazzy stand, but along with the weeds are 10-15 species of natives that I seeded, and a reasonable hope that this will look like a full stand next year with the whole panoply of species as crowns expand, rhizomes run and new seedlings emerge. The optimist in me says much of the emptiest area can look like this next year.

I also made some observations on the CRP field I seeded 7 years ago. There’s a real “Rambunctious Garden” thing going on there as the natives I planted try to reach an equilibrium with the weeds and create something new. Then today I took a path where I saw Canada anemone (Anemone canadensis), northern bedstraw (Galium boreale), a spiderwort (Tradescantia sp.) and cudleaf sage (Artemisia ludoviciana), none of which were planted in the field. The anemone, the bedstraw and the sage only had to move 50 feet from nearby prairie, while the spiderwort may have been a “contaminant” in the original seeding. Given enough time and some gentle management and we might see many species move around and find new homes. Who knows what might happen in 50 or 150 years. It is certain that the evolutionary fitness of all the native prairie species has depended upon their abilities to move and establish themselves in new homes, and only our short term focus and short lives limit our ability to envision what can occur.

And so I cling to my hopes. “Enough” has not yet been reached, and I have not yet given up on my goal of a diverse plant environment which will provide benefits for a long time. We have US Fish and Wildlife easements on adjoining ground and the hope is that we could offer some or all of the restoration field for easement consideration in the future. For some reason this reminded me of a line from Douglas Adams’ classic “A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”. An alien being becomes immortal through an accident and becomes so bored that he takes on the quest to personally insult every being in the universe in alphabetical order (if you haven’t read the book, you need to). When a killjoy informs him of the impossibility of the quest, even for an immortal being, he simply fixes the naysayer with a steely glare and says, “A man can dream, can’t he?” Well, I’m not sure where that apocryphal example fits in with my restoration blog, but I feel the urge to reply to the naysayer within my own brain, “A man can dream, can’t he?”