grassland restoration network

Adding seed to a failed planting feels like spending good money after bad. Better to add seed to restorations that are doing well and make them great.

Example by volunteer stewards Jennifer and Chris Hauser

Back in 2004, Jennifer and Chris Hauser adopted a mature, 14 year old, planting that looked like a keeper.  An hour walk through this 15 acre planting gave us 84 species, with a dozen of those being weeds.  Way back in 1993 the planting had a horrific amount of white sweet clover which we reduced over the years with timed mowings at full flower, and then careful spot treatments annually after.  There is still sweetclover there but manageable.  The Hausers are standing in this planting and it looks nice, a keeper.

So Jennifer and Chris harvested an additional mass of seed from various species they decided should be there and were not.  They picked another 8 pounds per acre of bulk weight of seed.  In the fall Chris roughed up the top few inches of soil with a harrow.  They then planted the seed on the top with a tractor mounted seed broadcaster, and then harrowed again.

From walking around the planting a number of times the following season we felt the harrowing did not harm the plants already established. There was a flush of black eyed susan recruitment (which was not over-seeded but there were 5 to 10 seedling per square foot), and pale purple coneflower (which was planted but it not as much as what we saw which was 1 to 2 seedlings per square foot).  So maybe other good things we wanted also germinated.  Important to us was that we also did not get a flush of white sweet clover.

The next year the Hausers had a local greenhouse produce 300 prairie coreopsis plugs and 760 northern dropseed plugs.  They plugged these plants in various pods spread out around the planting.  They had a wet spring and most of those plugs took and can be seen years later.

For several years after they  continued to add seed to the planting on a less intense scale.

Here and there you find a plant they likely over-seeded.  It is a subtle change.  We find over-seeding takes five to eight years to show up as flowering plants.

This was all a good amount of joyful work.   But would you do this on a low diversity planting that had unchecked invasive weed problems?  Again, the lesson learned is over-seed successful plantings with more success.

Chris and Jennifer Hauser were energetic volunteers with Nachusa for about eight years.  Chris did his master work in plant ecology at Nachusa.  They moved to Carmel California where Chris works for the Santa Lucia Conservancy.

Better to go slow enough to do the job well.  If you have enough seed to plant 15 acres you might be better to put that seed on 5.  Why?  Because planting too thin is a common cause of poor results. That five great acres can yield the seed to plant the next five and the next 50. Large prairie plantings thinly populated by native plants leads to weeds, work, and aggravation.

An example of well done: Volunteers Tom and Jenny Mitchell had 28 acres of former row crop ground to plant but did the job in four plantings of 7 acres each.  Below they stand in their very nice two year old prairie planting with 52 species planted at about 25 pounds per acre bulk weight. They restricted the species in the planting to those that occurred on the adjacent remnant prairie.  After two years they had 56 native plants, a native mean Conservatism of 4.4, and transect Floristic Quality Index of 26. If you don’t know what those values mean, the point is they got a lot of nice plants filling in what was a crop field.  The planting looks like a remnant prairie.   Now, after a decade has passed this planting is still looking very good.

It takes a lot of seeds per acre to make sure an area fills in with native plants, not weeds.

In the photo, around 3,000 pounds of hand collected seed is being mixed on the floor.   There is over 125 species in this dry-mesic seed mix.  Some of the barrels have just one species of seed. In a new planting that was a former row crop field, we are planting 40 to 60 pounds per acre.  We don’t clean our seed so perhaps 40% of that bulk weight is chaff.  The bottom line is this is a lot of seed per acre.

Further west of Nachusa, Chris Helzer in dry Nebraska is getting solid results using much less seed per acre on sandy soils.

When we look back on our past plantings we feel confident that poor plantings often resulted from “spreading our seed too thin”, the metaphor made real.

This prairie planting created by volunteer steward, Bernie Buchholz and friends,  is very diverse with over 165 species of plants showing up after several years from 175 species planted.  Yes, there is an eye popping amount of pale purple coneflower and a storm front to capture the drama. 

Over the next several posts I will share lessons learned on prairie restoration.  The first lessons is to decide whether you want high or low diversity results. 

High diversity takes extra time and resources to produce. If your habitat restoration goal is short term like with a Conservation Reserve Program ten year contract, then simply plant some grasses and maybe a few forbs.  

If you want habitat for birds then you may not need a plethora of plant species.  But, if you want to mimic the diversity of remnant prairie on the assumption that good things will result, or to provide habitat for all sorts of insects, or you want to connect remnant prairies with restored prairies in between….then you are talking about high diversity, and my lessons learned are for you.

Save the date!

Nachusa Grasslands will host the next Grassland Restoration Network workshop on September 9, 10, and 11, 2014.

Registration will only be $50 to $75 and include most meals. Such a deal.

The target audience for the GRN workshop are people actively doing/directing high diversity prairie restoration at a significant scale; or doing the science. The workshop has a lot of field time with some inside talks. We talk a lot about techniques, equipment, monitoring and measuring success, the science behind the restoration, and other wonkish topics.

Nachusa Grasslands has over 110 prairie plantings and many nice remnant prairies for you to look at, with many restoration very well done. September is a nice time of year too. Nachusa Grasslands is two hours west of Chicago in Illinois. http://www.nachusagrasslands.org/

So put the date on your calendar, and budget enough money for registration, travel, and hotel. We will have more details at this site by May.

Above: An asian bushclover, Lespedeza daurica, speciman sits out to help people learn what this invasive weed looks like.  You can’t kill it with Transline/Stinger but triclopyr or Milestone does the job.

Every manager has their list of what weeds they have to control and what herbicides or techniques they use to control it.  The link below is my current list:

https://grasslandrestorationnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/which-herbicide-for-various-weeds-july-2013.pdf