fall prairie burn

Following a fairly cold October, an indian summer has arrived giving us the unique weather conditions conducive to a fall burn. On Sunday November 8th, with help from the local fire department we burned the half acre roadside prairie. In a previous post I talked about an experimental patch of the roadside prairie that I was working on in the spring of 2008. The experiment included removing the existing cool-season vegetation with a single glyphosate treatment and then burning the dead thatch to expose a clean seedbed for native prairie seeding. All this was done in the late spring as to maximize the eradication of newly emerging exotic species as well as expedite germination of the warm-season plants. As of now this has been a successful strategy. In our roadside prairie the plan is to burn the accumulated dead thatch in the fall, seed all cold moist stratification required seeds in early winter, glyphosate early emerging cool-season non-natives in late March of 2010, and plant warm-season grasses in late April/early May 2010. See photos...

Maples earnin' their keep

Fall is always a bit depressing when you consider that the comfortable weather is now behind you, though nature definitely has a way to make us all feel better about the moment.

Most restoration purists, and I include myself in this too, think red maples are just downright out of place in a prairie and savanna ecosystem. We're probably right too considering they wouldn't have really colonized the uplands without the absence of fire. And while all summer long they just don't have the rugged character of the fire-dependent ecosystems like the oaks and black cherrys do, I thank myself every fall for not excluding them totally.















The color they add to the landscape is just too nice to ignore. On my property, the soil is almost all fine-textured clay-loam with the exception of a few sanding spots. This is just the nature of the neighborhood's end moraines as my neighbors have soil that is almost pure sand and some really nice loam. Though, the heavy soils on my property have really allowed red maples to flourish. Rather than ignore them and try to treat the situation as my neighbors would, I have cultivated my restoration project around the idea that a more mesic and even wet-mesic type of prairie and savanna ecosystem would have occured here. With the clearing and burning that has been implemented in the last few years, I have noticed that the remnant flora is reinforcing my decisions too. Shining aster, new england aster, switch grass, boneset, fringed loosestrife and many wetland type sedges have flourished naturally as the fires have been reintroduced. I guess that some red maples may have survived in this wet-mesic type habitat too if there were wet conditions when the fires swept through this area.

2008's newly discovered plants

While our controlled burns were a bit of a flop this past spring, I did manage to add a few new species to the checklist.

Lactuca Canadensis (wild lettuce) is a plant most often found in savanna type habitats, however my first sighting of this tall plant was in the middle of our mesic prairie. After I was able to identify this plant, I began to recognize it along the sides of some back roads and in a few heavily shaded areas. It is an interesting plant that can achieve incredible heights. I found one across the street that was growing in a dead stand of white ash that was approximately 10 feet tall. The one discovered in the prairie was only about 4 feet tall, and being a biennial that probably means it grows best in semi-shaded areas. See photo.

Another interesting plant was dudley's rush, a dry prairie rush. In fact, I believe it is one of the only non-wetland rushes that are characteristic of dry prairie habitats. Hopefully it will naturally spread with the introduction of fire to that area.