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| XLP garden plot | |
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This year has been the first growing season for three garden beds planted with locally collected prairie seeds. The process of preparing these gardens started last growing season with the spraying of the garden beds. I sprayed the beds with 3% glyphosate solution several times throughout the growing season in order to kill persistant perrenials and to start to deplete the seed bank of various annual species. This practice of spraying throughout the season takes patience and persistance, but having a seedbed free of competing vegetation makes establishing a garden from seed very simple.
All three of these beds contain a similar mix of species. The grass component of the seed mix includes (listed in order of abundance), sideoats grama, little bluestem, poverty oatgrass and arctic brome.
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| Chinese mantis: Tenodera sinensis |
The forb component was planted separately in early February to allow time for the forb seed to stratify. Most forb species seed will not germination without exposure to a cold moist enviroment over a period of about two months. The february sowing seemed to be adequate for breaking seed domancy of most the species planted which includes,
Rudbeckia hirta, Eupatorium altissimum, Asclepias tuberosa, Asclepias verticilliata, Asclepias viridiflora, Solidago juncea, Solidago nemoralis, Allium cernuum, Trichostema brachiatum, Heliopsis helianthanoides, Pycnanthemum incanum, Blephilia ciliata, Desmodium paniculatum and
Aster laevis. At the time of sowing the seeds were simply scattered evenly of over the soil surface, and were buried over time by the heave/thaw action of the winter time soil.
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| maryland senna: Senna marilandica |
Pictured above is my maryland senna seed production patch I planted in spring of 2011. To prepare them for germination I pulsed the extremely hard seeds in a blender to chip and scarify the seed coat. Senna seeds will not germinate without mechanical scarification or weathering in the soil over a period of a couple years, so I choose the short term option. These plants originated from seed collected from several small plants growing in a Juniata County XLP under very dry rocky soil conditions. Growing them out in this double dug vegetable garden allowed these plants to reach their current size and produce a similar amount of seed in their first year of growth from seed.
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| sideoats grama: Bouteloua curtipendula |
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This is my sideoats grama seed production bed. It was established from seed from several prairies in Centre County in 2012. This plot is also located in a old vegetable garden bed and the grasses have managed to bloom and set quite a bit of seed in their first season of growth. The red colored parts of this plant are the pollen producing anthers.
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This garden was previously planted in virginia wildrye along with some other flowers. In midsummer before the wildrye set seed I applied gylphosate throughout the bed. Since the initial application I made several isolated follow up treatments. I decided to the leave the exotic Buddleia or Butterfly bush as it smells so nice and pollinators love it. It does have the ability to self sow, but not to an unmanagable degree. Beside the Buddleia, I left three eastern redcedars in the bed to provide some evergreen cover and to create some of the physical structure of the local prairies. This plot gets more shade from the nearby walnut canopy and will probably have no true prairie grasses seeded. Im considering using bottle brush (
Eylmus hystrix) as the dominant graminoid in the background areas of this plot, with the shorter poverty oatgrass (
Danothonia spicata) planted in drifts in the foreground area.
