2010 RECAP - corner lot project

With February pretty much out of the way and spring right around the corner, I've started thinking about what to expect this season from our corner lot project. We had a lot of success in 2010 and should be pleasantly surprised when things start growing in 2011.

On the corner lot, which was added to the roster in the early part of 2010, we conducted a very successful prescribed burn in March. Immediately after the burn, we went to work rerouting an old drainage ditch that ran along the west property boundary down towards a hardwood swamp area that leads to Duck Lake. Our goal with the ditch was to reconfigure it to meander through the lower end of the corner lot more naturally like a stream. By doing this, the ditch looks more natural and dissipates water more effectively, reducing sediment pollution in the hardwood swamp. We also planted a few white pines and caged some nice oak saplings on the site to provide visual screening to the nearby residence.

Throughout the growing season we noticed a variety of native wildflowers that had sprung up due to our burning and weed management activities. Among them were Culver's Root (pictured), Fringed Loosestrife, Joe-Pye Weed, Boneset, Butterfly Weed, Thimbleweed and Saw-tooth Sunflower.

From our lakefront native plant garden at the Cottage we were able to produce a lot of seed from some of the more significant and rare native species. The nice thing about growing them at the Cottage is that there are no large herbivores (ie, deer) to damage plants during the growing season, so we get a lot of seed from these plants (over-nutrified water from White Lake helps the plants grow like they're on steroids too!!). Cottage grown plants include Blue Vervain, Turtlehead, Marsh Blazing Star, Great Blue Lobelia, Cardinal Flower, Ironweed, Soft-Stemmed Bulrush and Tussock Sedge. We were fortunate enough to plant a lot of this seed before our last snow storm hit. The snow will help work the seed into the soil as it melts in the spring and will (hopefully) satisify any cold-stratification requirements that the seed needs for germination.

I'm currently working on getting our burn plans finalized for this season and will hopefully get a chance to finish the bridge and do some more brush removal before the ground thaws.

Landscape Scale_REV

Yesterday my dad and I went for a hike at the Field Trial Area of Highland State Recreation to see how the habitat restoration work was coming along. At this particular area of the park, the Department of Natural Resources has spent a significant amount of time working to restore the area to native grasslands. More specifically, they have implemented prescribed burning and weed management to bring the land back to its former "black oak barrens" character. What amazes me most about this place is the immense scale of the restoration. There's really no other place locally where you can see black oak barrens at the landscape scale. There are a lot of small high quality examples around which are nice when analyzing specific plants, but the quality of this place is its grand scale that allows you to understand how the area looked historically.

This time of the year you can see alot more of the variation among different forms of vegetation. Pines stand in dark contrast to the oaks, while the native prairie grasses (orange clumps) can be easily distinguished from the wildflowers and non-native grasses. In a couple of areas, the native grasses are so bright that it feels like it illuminates the space around you. Little bluestem, the most colorful of the native grasses, adds a lot of color to the winter landscape, which is otherwise dull and drabby (especially on a cloudy day).