Prairie Reconstruction

We will be starting a prairie reconstruction in Vaughn Prairie #2 management area this year.  What is a prairie reconstruction and is it the same as a prairie restoration?  A restoration starts with a degraded prairie, one that is overrun with invasives, and restores it by removing invasives, perhaps adding a few natives, and implementing prescribed burns.  A reconstruction starts with something other than a prairie, like an old field, and makes a prairie from scratch.  Vaughn Prairie #2 is an old field.  It is the first field on the right, past the ponds,  as you drive toward the Volunteer Management Unit or Bog Birch, where we worked from 2005-2008.

What does starting mean?  Establishing a prairie is a multi-year process.  Most the first year is spent eliminating weeds, the second and third years are spent mowing and it isn't until the third or fourth year that there will be many many obvious prairie plants.  This year we will use the herbicide glyphosate when the weeds are 10" tall, glyphosate again when any regrowth reaches 10" tall, disc to stimulate germination of weed seeds in the soil, and glyphosate again when those weeds reach 10" or at the end of September if they haven't gotten that big by that time.  Glyphosate doesn't persist in the soil so it won't interfere with germination of seeds that are planted after it is used.  In October we can broadcast seeds we have collected this year.  Most prairie plant seeds need a period of cold stratification.  By planting this year's crop of seeds this fall they will be fresh and viable, get cold stratification over the winter, and can germinate in the spring.

I have marked the tentative location with long poles with red flags on top.  The location is near the road for easy access to work on it and for visibility for appreciating it and is in a part of the field dominated by cool season grasses where there aren't many natives.  The area isn't very big but intensive management is necessary to get it off to a good start.  We don't want such a big area that we can't be successfull or that establishing the prairie takes time away from followup in areas of the fen where the large invasives have been removed. 

It would be possible to glyphosate the whole field.  We aren't doing this for two reasons.  First, as mentioned above, it would take too many resources.  Second, there are parts of the field with high  concentrations of native plants and high concentrations of native insects which support native birds.  These plants and insects would be lost if the whole field were herbicided and they would not all come back even if there were enough resources to plant seeds and control the weeds.  Comparing this field now with the reconstructed prairie on Rogers Highway we see that the reconstructed prairie is very scenic and impressive but it is strangely devoid of many insects, even years after planting.

Some prairie plantings use precisely measured quantities and percentages of different species of forbs and grasses.  We are going to take a simpler approach and plant whatever we collect and whatever we like, as long as they are plants native to Lenawee County, preferably collected in Lenawee County.  If you know a favorite prairie plant growing in the county, collect the seeds this year when they are ripe, keep them in a dry place safe from mice, and come out for our planting day in the fall.  White asters, small flowered goldenrod (not Showy Goldenrod or Stiff Goldenrod) and wild bergamot are well established in the rest of the field so we probably don't need any more of those.

All that has been done so far is to mark the location of this prairie, so there is still time to modify our plans.  Let me know if you have any suggestions.  We are starting the prairie project this year so that next year, when the buckthorn is finished, and a few years after that, when the honeysuckle is finished, we will have a prairie to work on.

February Updates

Mike has found an arborist to take down and remove the two big Siberian Elm trees on the south side of the field station lot. They produce thousands of seeds every year and are too big for us to cut down with our chainsaws. We could kill them with drill and fill but when they died and fell down they might hit something they shouldn’t, like the house or the shed or Dave Krueger’s Christmas trees.

Rodolfo, Denny, Sarah, and Mike burned most of the brush piles in Super Sumac. There are some left on the south edge east edges. They plan to burn more when weather permits. We need snow on the ground as a safety factor but not on the piles because that makes it too hard to get them lit.  You can see what the area looks like now in the photo below.

On Thursday Mike and Rodolfo interviewed for a person to work at Ives this summer. There were four candidates.

On Tuesday David Mindell, who owns PlantWise, a commercial restoration company, will visit the fen to check out the area we want to clear with the stimulus funds. We expect that he will be able to clear the north end of the central fen and the south end as far as Property Line Ditch but probably won’t get to Siberian Elmia, which isn’t high priority anyway.

The 30 Delta Airlines employees who were going to come on April 17 have turned into 30 employees each day who will come on April 21-23. They will fly into Detroit in the morning, pull some garlic mustard, eat at the field station, and then pull some more garlic mustard before flying home in the afternoon. Possible areas for them to work are the north end of the floodplain forest where we work every year, the areas north and south of the path behind the field station, the area near Sutton Road where we cut honeysuckle the first Saturday in June last year, and the area across the river where the Heartleaf Skullcap grows. I will scout out the potential areas a few days before they get here. We might work two areas each day since we will be eating lunch at the field station.

We are still expecting an Americorps crew from the end of March to the beginning of June, mainly to help with prescribed burns, follow-up on the areas cleared by David Mindell, and do some torch burns.

Rodolfo hired Sarah Cech to work with him and Denny at Grand River this summer. She is from Ohio and is spending the week in Jackson while she is working here.

Ten Ohio State students are coming to Ives for alternate break from June 12-19. They will mainly be working at Grand River but we can probably get them for a day if we want to do a weekday workday.

Circle K is signed up for honeysuckle cutting on March 20.

We might cut honeysuckle on March 13. I see a 40° in the forecast for next week and hopefully it the weather will be OK the week after that.

We will have a display at Tecumseh Earth Day on April 17.