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...