Last winter we planted the seeds of 73 different native flowers, and 9 native grasses and sedges.  This year I've found 27 of those flowers blooming, and 5 or 6 "volunteers" - native flowers that we didn't plant, but came up from seeds that were in the soil.  I haven't seen any of the grasses, but grasses and sedges take longer to get established - we should see more of them next year.

While I was standing at the edge of the prairie a few days ago, a flock of birds was twittering in the trees and searching for bugs in the prairie.  I saw (and heard) Chickadees, Cardinals, several different Flycatchers that I couldn't identify, and lots of warblers: Common Yellowthroats, Black and White Warblers, Wilson's Warblers, and a Red-eyed Vireo.  So look for birds as well as flowers at this time of year!

I also saw a few migrating Monarch butterflies and lots of honey bees and bumblebees.

Monarch

Bumblebee on a Sneezeweed flower

The northern, drier half of the meadow has lots of Evening Primrose.  It's a fast growing plant that shouldn't be so prominent in later years.  But it provided plenty of flowers this summer, and it's still blooming.

Evening Primrose

This is a view of the southern, wetter half of the prairie.  This is where most of the flowers are right now.

Here are the flowers I found there this week.

Common False Foxglove

American Burn Weed - this is one of the volunteers.  It's a plant that comes up after burns or other disturbance, and will probably disappear as the prairie becomes more established.

Nodding Bur-marigold

Black-eyed Susan

Blue Lobelia

Blue Vervain

Another volunteer - Canada Goldenrod.  It's native, but pretty aggressive.  (We'll have to keep an eye on it to be sure it doesn't become too dominant.)

Cinnamon Willow-herb

Boneset

Flat-top Aster

Fleabane - another of the volunteers

Grass-leaved Goldenrod

Ironweed

Jewelweed - another volunteer

Joe Pye Weed

False Boneset

Water Horehound

New England Aster - not quite in bloom yet

Ox-eye

Smartweed - a volunteer

Smooth Blue Aster - with honeybee

Sneezeweed

I call this Sweet Everlasting - I don't like the more commonly used name: Cudweed - and the plant does have a very sweet fragrance

Tall Boneset

Tall Sunflower

Tall Swamp Marigold

White Snakeroot - another volunteer.  This one is somewhat weedy, especially in shady places.  I think once the prairie gets more established, we won't see so much of it.

Try it out!   It's winding, and level, and goes through both the dry and the wet parts of the prairie.    The mowing guys will mow it every week, so it will stay accessible.

Watch for the flowers to start blooming.  There are Black-eyed Susans, Blue Vervain, and Evening Primrose which all should start blooming soon.   Self-heal - a small purple wetland plant - is already blooming in the wettest places.  We didn't plant it - it's a volunteer.

I've been weeding out some of the most undesirable weeds.  (Please don't do any weeding in the prairie without talking to me first - you need to learn what you can pull.)  The prairie will probably have more weeds its first year because a lot of the "good" plants aren't very big yet.  Once the prairie plants start to mature, they will tend to crowd out the weeds.

Watch for American Lady caterpillars on the Pussytoes that some of you planted last year.  Pussytoes is a short plant with leaves that are dark green on top, and fuzzy white underneath.  American Lady butterflies lay their eggs on the leaves, and their caterpillars eat them.  You'll see small "nests" that the caterpillars build for protection.

As the caterpillars get bigger, they come out of their nests to eat.

Watch for the adult butterflies - they're beautiful - a little smaller than monarchs.  Here are photos of one I saw at the farm a few years ago.

The top of its wings

The underside of the wings

Marcie O'Connor
June 22, 2010

Marcie O'Connor   3/16/10

This is what the seeds look like.

Here we are, dumping the seeds into buckets and getting organized.

We had to do the planting on snowshoes - the snow was too deep to walk in easily.

I divided the field into 4 sections with my snowshoe tracks - I divided the wettest area from the drier area, and then I divided each of those areas in half.   The seeds were also divided: two buckets of seeds that like wet places, and two that like drier places.

Dottie in snowshoes

Chuck planting - throwing the seeds out onto the snow

Sara planting

Dottie planting

Here we are at the end - with cold faces and empty buckets.

Over the winter the seeds will melt down through the snow, and the freezing and thawing will help to work them into the soil.  By spring they'll be ready to germinate.

Mike and I put together a video of the planting - set to some of his music.

Marcie O'Connor
January 20, 2010

Today we added a few more seeds to the prairie meadow.  Marcia Sundquist planted some seeds of plants that like shade, and I planted a few of the berries I had collected last fall - Winterberry and Solomon's Seal.

Here's Marcia on snowshoes.

And Marcia planting

Marcie O'Connor
February 9, 2010

(It's a long list - I'm trying for a very diverse prairie.  Diversity is good even in a small prairie.  Diverse plant communities are more stable, more able to resist invaders (weeds), and more attractive to wildlife.)

Forbs (flowers)

Agalinis tenuifolia - Slender Gerardia
Amorpha canescens – Lead Plant
Anemone cylindrica – Thimbleweed
Anemone virginiana – Tall Thimbleweed
Asclepias exaltata – Poke Milkweed
Asclepias incarnata – Swamp Milkweed
Asclepias syriaca – Common Milkweed
Asclepias tuberosa - Butterfly Weed
Asclepias verticillata - Whorled Milkweed
Aster ericoides – Heath Aster
Aster laevis – Smooth Blue Aster
Aster lateriflorus – Calico Aster
Aster novae-angliae – New England Aster
Aster oolentangiensis – Sky-blue Aster
Aster pilosus – Frost Aster
Aster sagittifolius – Arrow-leaved Aster
Aster umbellatus – Flat-topped Aster
Astragalus canadensis – Canada Milk-vetch
Baptisia bracteata – Cream Wild Indigo
Baptisia alba – White Wild Indigo
Bidens cernuus – Nodding Bur Marigold
Bidens coronata – Tall Swamp Marigold
Campanula americana – American Bellflower
Castilleja coccinea – Indian Paintbrush
Chamaecrista fasciculata – Partridge Pea
Chelone glabra – Turtlehead
Cirsium discolor – Field Thistle
Cirsium muticum – Swamp Thistle
Epilobium coloratum – Cinnamon Willow-herb
Eupatorium altissimum – Tall Boneset
Eupatorium maculatum – Joe Pye-weed
Eupatorium perfoliatum – Boneset
Eupatorium purpureum – Sweet Joe-Pye Weed
Euphorbia corollata – Flowering Spurge
Euthamia graminifolia – Grass-leaved Goldenrod
Galium boreale - Northern Bedstraw
Gentiana alba – White Gentian
Gentianella quinquefolia – Stiff Gentian
Gentianopsis crinita – Fringed Gentian
Geum aleppicum – Yellow Avens
Gnaphalium obtusifolium – Sweet Everlasting
Helenium autumnale – Sneezeweed
Heliopsis helianthoides – Oxeye
Hypericum pyramidatum – Giant St. John’s Wort
Iris versicolor – Wild Iris
Kuhnia eupatorioides – False Boneset
Lespedeza capitata – Round-headed Bush Clover
Liatris aspera – Rough Blazing Star
Liatris linguistylis – Meadow Blazing Star
Lilium michiganense – Turks Cap Lily
Lobelia cardinalis – Cardinal Flower
Lobelia siphilitica – Blue Lobelia
Lycopus americanus – Water Horehound
Lysimachia ciliata – Fringed Loosestrife
Oenothera biennis – Evening Primrose
Pedicularis lanceolata – Swamp Betony
Penstemon grandiflorus – Large-flowered Penstemon
Polygonatum biflorum – Solomon’s-seal
Rudbeckia hirta - Black-eyed Susan
Rudbeckia laciniata – Wild Golden Glow
Silphium perfoliatum – Cup Plant
Solidago flexicaulis – Zig-zag Goldenrod
Solidago juncea – Early Goldenrod
Solidago nemoralis – Gray Goldenrod
Solidago rigida – Stiff Goldenrod
Solidago speciosa – Showy Goldenrod
Thalictrum dasycarpum – Tall Meadow Rue
Tradescantia ohiensis – Spiderwort
Verbena hastata – Blue Vervain
Verbena stricta – Hoary Vervain
Vernonia fasciculata – Ironweed
Veronicastrum virginicum – Culver’s Root
Zizia aurea – Golden Alexander

Grasses & Sedges

Bromus ciliatus
Bromus kalmii
Cinna arundinacea - Sweet Wood-reed
Elymus canadensis – Canada Wild Rye
Elymus hystrix – Bottlebrush Grass
Elymus villosus – Silky Wild Rye
Sedges – mixed
Sorghastrum nutans – Indian Grass
Spartina pectinata – Cord Grass

Marcie  12/7/09

Here's some information about how I've collected and processed the seeds we'll be planting.

I collected seeds for the prairie during the summer and fall of 2009, from roadsides

wet cow pastures

and from the prairies on our land

The easiest way to collect the seeds is to cut the tops off the plants, when the seeds are mature, let the plant material dry, and then rub it across a coarse screen, to separate the seeds from the stems and leaves.

Here are some piles of plants drying.

This is where I process the seeds.  I rub the plants across the screen, and the seeds fall into the plastic bin.

After the seeds are cleaned, I store them in bags or cans until it's time to plant.

Some parts of our meadow are sunny and fairly dry, some are very wet and some are very shady.  I've divided up the seeds into 3 containers, so that we can plant them in the places where they'll grow best.

Marcie O'Connor
12/28/2009

The grassy area is below and to the east of the garden plots.  It's low, and very wet, so no one walks there, and it's often difficult to mow.  We thought that a prairie would be more interesting to look at, wouldn't have to be mowed, and would attract more wildlife.

Even though this area is wet, it will be a prairie.  The word "Prairie" means a grassland - an open, treeless area where the dominant species are grasses.  Many prairies are dry, but there are also mesic (medium moisture) prairies and wet prairies.  Often wet prairies grade in to sedge meadows - treeless areas where the dominant species are sedges.  (Sedges are plants that look a lot like grasses, but are in a different family.  They tend to replace grasses in wetter areas.)  Our meadow will have some sedges, but more grasses.

Dottie Waltz and I proposed the plan to the committees and to the board, and when it was approved, in mid-October of 2009, we started the project.

Here's the area in September 2009, before we started.  This is looking south-east, towards the woods along the south side.  The weather had been very dry, but this area holds so much moisture that most of the grass is still green.

Another 'before' photo, looking north-east.  The northern edge is higher and drier.  The fenced garden plots are mine - they have native prairie plants growing in them.  After the spraying is finished, I'll remove the fencing and the wooden edges, and the plants will blend in to the prairie.

Dottie and Marcie - figuring out the boundary of the prairie area.

Marcie & Dottie

I sprayed the field with Roundup at the beginning of October to kill the grass.  For Roundup to work well, the plants need to be actively growing.  The weather in October was so cool that they were growing more slowly than usual, so it took almost 3 weeks for the grass to die. On October 22nd, it was finally starting to turn yellow.

I resprayed some of the spots I missed.

photo by Robert O'Connor

November 13th - the grass finally looks dead.

Marcie O'Connor -  December 5, 2009

Now that we've gotten the hang of maintaining our 1666 site, I've arbitrarily decided that it's time to move into the next phase -- blogging.  This is this first of what I hope will be many posts about topics of interest to our community.  Marcie is going to write a post about her prairie planting project back by the garden plots to kick us off.  Think of the possibilities!

Blog on!