2011 Corner Lot Review

A few things regarding our corner lot prairie restoration for 2011. First, our prescribed burn (March 19) was one of the earliest that we've done. We started late in the day and despite the really dry fuel conditions, the relative humidity rose sharply as the sun set and made it hard to finish. At the lower (southern) end of the site, burning was really successful but as we moved north toward White Lake Road, we found more shade and the burn was less efficient. Timing the burn is always tricky and it's hard to resist taking advantage of good dry sunny weather. In the future, I think we'll need to be more patient and try timing later burns to suppress canada goldenrod and canada thistle. This will also help improve the presence of warm-season plants like big bluestem, indian grass and butterfly weed.

Second, Canada thistle is still prevalent in this prairie, yet I don't think it has really spread as rapidly as I originally thought. It is rhizomatous and able to spread and occupy large areas as a single clone, but I think the Canada goldenrod is giving it some healthy competition. So, controlling it with herbicide and/or cutting during the bloom period will still be a priority, though it can be spread out over the next several years without affecting the rest of the prairie's development. Keeping Canada thistle from going to seed will be the major challenge. It is a short-lived plant, so keeping it from reseeding might effectively reduce its occurence over time despite the fact that it spreads vegetatively underground.

Gray dogwood was very prevalent when we began work on this site, though with our annual burns, we've managed to reduce its occurence as well. A lot of experts warn of the danger of not eliminating rhizomatous shrubs such as gray dogwood and sumac due to the fact that they can spread rapidly and usually do with prescribed burning. Yet this varies from site to site and is not a particular problem with the corner lot. Small shrubs add vertical structure to a prairie too which is beneficial to certain ground nesting birds. So my opinion is keep it, but keep an eye on it too. In an effort to reduce the size and "wildness" of the cottage native plant gardens, we removed several of the big plants and transplanted them to the corner lot, locating them in the swale along Highland Hills Drive. These included boneset, ironweed, soft-stemmed bulrush, sweet flag, blue vervain, marsh blazing star and one prairie dock - pretty much everything that was there. These plants are flourishing at the corner lot and even flowered this year despite the fact that they were transplanted during the peak of growing season which typically is unsuccessful. The swale was a good spot for them because they would receive ample amounts of water naturally and survive any late season dry-spells. Our one prairie dock suffered a minor setback due to the fact that this plant has a substantial taproot, making it hard to transplant. The original basal leaves died in August, curling up and drying out, yet in late September there were a new set of leaves emerging. It will be interesting to see how it does. Prairie dock tends to establish slowly enough as it is, so I'm sure it will be several years before we see flowers. It would probably be advisable to plant more seedlings of this plant just to increase the chance of survival.

Dad made a few sweet purchases at the Six Rivers Native Plant Festival on September 17th. He managed to purchase two American Chestnut saplings!! These are extremely rare to find and the survival rate is quite slim due to the fact that the chestnut blight supposedly still exists on oak trees, so we'll see what happens with them. All we can do is be optimistic and treat them with extreme care. Maybe the annual fires will help suppress the existence of blight and help the trees mature and become strong enough to resist it. Perhaps the trees could survive long enough to produce chestnuts and start the next crop of trees, creating a perpetual crop of new seedlings? I managed to pick up a couple of rosinweed (Silphium integrifolium) seedlings from American Roots this year too, so we'll get those established on the corner lot as well.

Our shoulder experiment went pretty well for the first year too. In May, dad sprayed the shoulder with glyphosate killing most of the vegetation along the road where we want to get prairie grasses established. Some Canada thistle and sweet clover managed to escape the chemical warfare, but the grass we planted grew fairly well in the spaces between. A few plants even went to seed despite the crappy soil used to fill in the shoulder when White Lake Road and Highland Hills Drive got paved. It's hard to really know how much of it germinated and survived the hot summer (we had several weeks of 90'sish weather this summer) and it definitely looked sparse. All I know is that the shoulder at Pinefield filled in quite well with indian grass and big bluestem (that shoulder is in it's second growing season), so we'll just have to be patient, keep the invasives from flowering and continue to annually plant this area with more grass seed in order to get it really established. I think it will do fine. All the experts claim that big bluestem and indian grass are "clay buster" species, meaning that they can establish in hard, heavy soils like the fill dirt on the shoulder. The nice thing about the hard soil is that it is nutrient deficient, which reduces the amount of competition that occurs there, leaving the site open to lots of sunlight which is good for the native grasses. So it'll be interesting as always to watch this site continue to develop!