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cc >> Thanks for coming today. My name is Neil Diboll from Prairie Nursery in Westfield, Wisconsin. We're going to talk about, today, how to create prairie meadows and gardens. The five steps on how to do it right by planning in advance. Making sure you've got all your ducks in a row so you can be successful with this very wonderful style of gardening that more and more people are doing to create ecological, sensible landscapes that don't require lots of chemicals, fertilizers or other energy inputs to be successful. There's two different basic ways that you can create a prairie landscape. One is using transplants and the other is using seeds. Now all of you know from gardening that plants are a lot faster than seeds. How many people here have planted prairies from seeds? And how long did it take you to get results from that? >> A long time. >> A long time, usually three to five years. Now think about it, you're working up some ground, and we're going to talk about some specific methodologies for how to get your site prepared. You're working up the ground and you're throwing some seeds on the ground and saying, will you please grow and create this beautiful meadow for me? I want you to do almost all the work. In order for you to be successful in this you have to set the stage for those seeds to have success. The same goes for plants. You have to get everything ready to go, all the weeds out, the site prepared, the soil corrected or mended as necessary. Then put in your plants. Each methodology has its own step by step process. If you want, there's a website that posts the articles for today's talks. You'll be able to find mine at the Garden Expo website. It's the Five Step to a Successful Prairie and Meadow Establishment. The first step of the five steps is site selection. Pick your battles. Pick the site where you're going to have the best chance of success. What does a prairie need for success? Number one, it needs sun. Prairies grow in sun. You're not going to start a prairie in an oak woodland. You can maybe make a savanna or a woodland garden, but not a prairie. We need at least a half a day of full sun in order to grow your prairie plants. Yes, there are a few prairie plants that will grow in more shade than that. But the vast majority, in order for them to really perform well and to really bloom well and develop properly they need at least a half a day of full sun. Secondly, don't pick that old, weedy barnyard for your prairie. Has anybody ever worked in an old, weedy barnyard? I have at my house. It's a terrible, terrible situation. You have dozens of years, decades of years, of weed seeds that have been introduced into that. The weed seed bank stored in that soil can be almost impossible, insurmountable, to overcome. That's a very difficult situation. What are our best situations to convert into our prairie meadow? My favorite is lawn. Why is lawn relatively easy to convert into a prairie? Most lawns have been mowed within an inch or two of their life. Most weeds, not all, but especially if the lawn manager likes to use herbicides and kill weeds. You might not have any weeds in there. It's just lawn. If it's been there for 10, 20, 30, 40 years or more, the weed seeds that were harbored in the soil have slowly been deteriorating so that your weed seed bank is greatly reduced over those many years. We generally have a situation where we have a controllable population of weeds or very few weeds. All we have to do is kill the lawn grass. But beware, if you have quack grass in your lawn grass, that's a whole 'nother animal. Quack grass you cannot just kill off as easily because quack grass has these underground rhizomes that like to creep and crawl and go everywhere. I'm sure many of you know, much to your chagrin in your gardens. So let's say I'm going to kill my lawn using a glyphosate herbicide, or Roundup, which a lot of our customers do. You don't have to do that. Let say I'm going to do that. It's quick and easy. It will kill a bluegrass lawn in one shot. However, it will not kill the quack grass in one shot. Quack grass usually requires two, or more often three, applications of glyphosate at about two month intervals. So like one in May, one in July and one is September. That will usually kill almost all your weeds, if not all your weeds. There are a few broadleaf weeds that are resistant to glyphosate, those being Canada thistle, field bindweed and crown vetch. But almost all weeds can be killed with three applications of just straight glyphosate, or Roundup. Hey, you don't have to use herbicides. On small garden areas, cardboard. Cardboard is a wonderful, wonderful thing. It used to be we'd put down black plastic, but where's that black plastic come from? Oil, okay, that's not really ecological. Cardboard just comes from a bunch of dead trees we cut down. So who cares about that, we've got more where that came from. But seriously, the black plastic is a petroleum derived product then it's really hard to find a place to recycle that black plastic. So what a lot of people do is they put down cardboard. You put it down in spring, like April, and then you cover it with compost or leaf clippings, weed-free material to hold the cardboard in place. The cardboard will smother the vegetation for an entire year, all the way through the fall. Then you can either come in and put in your transplants in the fall, like in September, or the following spring. I usually wait until the next spring. Now I've had cardboard covering this area for a full growing season which will smother almost all your weeds with the exception of weeds like Canada thistle, field bindweed and crown vetch. They have these unbelievable roots that will survive a full year of smothering. In fact, back when I was in college, I went to school at UW-Green Bay, and four boys lived in an old farmhouse about three miles from school. We would walk or ski to school, up hill both ways, into the wind with the snow. Along our little country road they have just re-paved it. Along the side there was two or three inches of blacktop that they had put extra over where plants were growing before. As I'm walking to school every day there's this little part of the blacktop going up, up, up, up. I'm going, what is that? Then finally one day a plant came out of it and it was Canada thistle, through a couple, three inches of fresh blacktop. You've got to respect a plant like that. So you want to make sure you know who's in there, who you're fighting against, as part of your plan. What do I have to do, whether I'm using herbicides or whether I'm using smothering, or if I'm using some other format. On a larger area, and we have customers who don't want to use any chemicals which is a big part of what we do. We're trying to minimize our use of fertilizers, herbicides, etc. Rather than spraying an area for a year they will use smother crops like buckwheat. Has anybody used a buckwheat smother crop? This is what farmers used to use. If you read the old farming books from the 19th century into the early 20th century before there were herbicides, farmers would run buckwheat as a crop to control things like quack grass. Buckwheat creates these great big leaves and it gets five, six feet tall. It smothers the vegetation underneath by depriving it of sunlight. It creates a thick canopy. This is one way to control weeds. If you do buckwheat two years in a row. You start in June. It's very frost intolerant. You plow the field up, plant your buckwheat. Cut it down when it's in full bloom. Do not let it go to seed, or you will have buckwheat for life.

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Those buckwheat seeds will come up for a couple of years and you really probably don't want that. Oh, I've got a buckwheat prairie. Isn't that sweet? Then you plow the buckwheat under, usually in August. Let it sit for a couple of weeks so that you don't get problems with ammonia with the degradation of the plant material. Then you plant winter wheat, usually sometime early to mid-September. The winter wheat holds the soil over the winter. Then in the spring when the winter wheat is heading out you plow that under. All this while when you're plowing under, what are you adding to the soil? Organic matter. This is called green manuring. It's plant manure, or green manure. You're adding organic matter. This is really great for heavy clay soils and sandy soils that don't have a lot of organic matter. It helps build the soil. Then after we plow that winter wheat under then we will plant a second crop of buckwheat. Now we're in our second year of site preparation. We plant that buckwheat usually in early June after the danger of frost has passed. This year the danger of frost will be passed around July fourth.

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Because of our wonderful winter weather. But you plant that buckwheat for a second year and now you get a second year of smothering. The combination of two years of smothering, plus plowing it up and planting the buckwheat, the winter wheat and the buckwheat, you're harassing those weeds. You're smothering those weeds. Usually by the end of that second buckwheat crop in August of the second year you will have vanquished a vast majority, if not all, of the weeds completely organically, and added organic matter to your soil. If that's not an option for you you can, if you have a really bad situation like a field, an old field full of weeds, yes, you can convert this into a prairie. But you have to, if you're going to use herbicides, just like the buckwheat for two years, you're going to have to spray it for two years to kill everything. The first year you'll kill the perennials, but what's that leave in the ground? All kinds of weed seeds. So the second year we let all those weed seeds come up and then we will spray those all year. Thus depleting at least a significant proportion of the weed seeds in the soil. Then in the fall of the second year we will seed a dormant seeding, meaning that we plant it in October, November. The seed doesn't come up in the fall. It sits in the ground, just like it would in nature, and it come up the next spring. We don't till the soil if we can avoid it. Sometimes you might want to, but it's really easy to put that seed down, either in the fall, or some people will wait until sometime in late February, March when the snow is gone, like is say, probably July, when the snow is gone and the soil is just exposed. You can scatter your seed on the open soil or just a little bit of snow. This is called a frost seeding. The frost heave of the soil opens the ground up and the seeds go down into the soil just like they would naturally. You don't have to till anything up. Because what happens when we till the soil? After we spent all this time killing the weeds and the weed seeds, if we till the soil what do we do? We bring up weed seeds. It's self-defeating. We don't want to till that soil if we can avoid it prior to seeding. Sometimes we do till it. If it's a heavy clay we may still want to go in there and work that ground up. We'll see some examples of that today. First and foremost, pick your battles. Pick a good site, sunny, well-ventilated, not a history of a lot of weeds if you can avoid it. Then the site preparation part. You want to make sure that you spend the time to prepare the site, whether you're doing it organically or using herbicides, smothering or smother crops or extended periods of herbicide treatment. Then plant selection is step three. Pick the right plants to match your soil. I don't care how many Hail Marys you do, you're not going to make a plant that grows in sand grow in clay. It simply won't work. You can pray all you want, but if a plant is not adapted to grow in a certain spot, it's probably not going to. Now there are some notable exceptions. I'll tell you, I design seed mixes. In 25 of these species I just know are going to grow there, and a customer wants this certain one. We'll put it in, I don't think it's going to grow. And of course, every once in a while they will. A lot of times, the plants, they forget to read the book.

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But we want to select those plants as closely as possible to match our growing conditions. Meaning, is it a clay soil? Is it a loam soil? Is it a dry, sandy or rocky soil? Is it high and dry where there's lots of windy that's going top dry it out, or is it a low area where the soil is damp? We want to make sure we pick the exact right plants for the right situation. This is particularly important when you're doing a prairie meadow from seed, because it's a war out there. You've got to have the best possible selections to win that war. The weeds will win otherwise. In the garden? Here's the difference between a garden and a prairie meadow, a garden is like a hospital. All the plants are on intensive care.

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Okay? They're getting watered and mulched and maybe even fertilized, and maybe someone comes a long and cuts their little heads off. Who knows? You've got a much more control, so the bad guys can't necessarily horn in on your plants. When you're putting seed on the ground you're saying, guys, grow for me. I'm really not going to give you a lot of help. I killed the weeds, but now you're kind of on your own. It's a totally different game. So you've got to be really careful that you pick the right plants to match your growing conditions for success. So we've got site selection, site preparation and plant selection. The fourth step is the planting time and method. How are we going to plant those seeds or plants? Let's talk about plants first. I prefer putting in most plants in the spring, April or May. If you have irrigation you can plant in June, July, August. If you've got water it really doesn't matter. But you want to get them in in enough time for them to develop some good root systems before the onset of winter. There are some early blooming flowers, especially some of your woodland ephemerals, that are best planted in the fall. Those can be put in whenever they're available either as dormant bare root or as potted plants is September, even into October. That allows them to get situated before spring. And they come up so early in the spring that you want them to be in the ground ready to go so they can bloom on their normal schedule. A lot of times if you put spring ephemerals in late they're kind of freaked out. They bloom like a month or two too late. They just say, wow, this is too hot. I don't really want to grow right now. It's not good for them. So our early blooming plants are best planted in the fall, but the vast majority of our prairie plants bloom in summer and the later part of the fall, not so much in spring. Those are usually best installing in spring. That give them the maximum amount of time for their roots to become established prior to winter so you don't have winter losses. However, if you absolutely must put your plants in in the fall you can fool-proof it as much as possible, even on a year like this. The way you do that is, after you put in your plants you use liberal quantities of mulch. I will put in plants in September and let them have a couple of months of growth. September, October, maybe even into November to get well established and get their roots going. Then as soon as those plants turn dormant and their leaves turn brown or yellow or whatever, then I'll put three, or maybe even five or six, inches of clean straw mulch over the whole new bed where all my plants are. I'm assuming I'm not putting any seeds in, just plants. I'm going to cover everything with a heavy coat of mulch. I'm going to mark each plant with some kind of a marker. I like to use those little highway flags, with the little blue, red, purple, whatever color. You mark each plant. Then that protects the plants from a winter like this where it's so cold. You have that nice mulch layer of straw, clean straw like winter wheat. Be careful, don't do like I did on my first prairie and go, oh, look at that old hay up in the barn. I bet I could use that. It's free. Oh, my God. I mulched a seeded prairie with that and it grew up to a zillion weeds. Hay always has weed seeds. Winter wheat straw typically has very low level of weeds. Oats often does have weeds because oats are planted in spring. What else germinates in spring in the fields? All kinds of weeds. When winter wheat is planted in the fall not many weeds germinate in the fall. So winter wheat straw is always cleaner and has far less weeds than oats. So I will cover my plants with winter wheat straw. I mark each plant. Then in spring, late March or early April where each of those little flags are I go and just move that mulch back. Now remember that six inches of mulch after a winter is down to like two inches, maybe three inches max of mulch. It settles down. I just move a little bit away where each flag is so the new sprout from the flower or grass can come up through that and not be blocked. What else does that mulch do for us? It holds in the moisture so I don't have to water it as much, if at all. And it smothers weed seeds so it's preventing germination of weed seeds. Most weed seeds require light to get to the soil surface where it stimulates the weed seed to germinate. When it's got two, three inches of mulch over that weed seed it doesn't get light, it doesn't germinate and I don't have to pull weeds. That mulch not only protects my plants, it holds the moisture in for spring and keeps the weeds down. It's absolutely the most wonderful way to put a garden in in the fall. A lot of time you're really busy in the spring. If you have a little extra time, you can put your prairie garden in in September and kind of stretch out your different projects around the house. If I'm doing it in the spring or early summer, putting in my transplants, I'm still going to mulch it. It's still going to perform those functions of keeping moisture in and preventing, or at least greatly reducing, the germination of weed seeds. For those people who don't have a problem with using herbicides, after you put in your transplants in the spring you can use a pre-emergent herbicide. A lot of people use Preen, or there's different brands out there. You can put that down and then put the straw over that and you'll have almost no weeds. However, if you just use three inches of straw you really will stop most weeds from germinating so you don't have to necessarily use a pre-emersion herbicide. There's a lot of organic ways to do this. Let's talk about when to put your seeds in. This is a little trickier. It depends on whether your goals are primarily prairie grasses, most of which, not all but most of which are what we call warm season grasses. They germinate when the soil is warm and the weather is warm, May and June, even into July. A lot of your cold season grasses, which are typical of your lawn grasses, they do best seeded in the fall. They'll germinate in September. Most of them, not all. But most of your prairie grasses are warm season grasses. When seeded in May and June they do great. When seeded in the fall they typically do poorly, because they don't come up in the fall. They sit in the ground over the winter and something bad happens to them. I don't know what it is, but they don't germinate nearly as well the next spring as had they been seeded in the spring. The wildflowers, on the other hand, almost to a species, do better when seeded in the fall. Most of your prairie wildflowers, in fact most of you native wildflowers, has built in seed dormancies. Let's say I'm a seed and I'm ripe on October 15th like some many of your prairie flowers are. I fall on the ground. It's 65 degrees, it's raining. It like, wow, this is perfect! I'm germinating right now. All the sudden on November 12th, it's 20 degrees or 10 degrees or zero degrees, you're dead. You are out of the gene pool. Sorry, nice try. So what these plants have done, or how they've evolved over the years, is they have to be exposed to a period of cold conditions, and in many cases with your flowers, cold and moist conditions such as they experienced in the soil. That turns on a little timer inside them at the end of winter that says yes, I was exposed to these cold conditions so I didn't mistakenly germinate in October under the wrong conditions and die. So a lot of your wildflower seeds need to go through a period of cold, damp conditions in order to break seed dormancy. So fall seeding of your prairie flowers will almost invariably result in much higher germination than a spring or summer seeding of most of your prairie flowers. There are some prairie flowers that seem to germinate well no matter whenever you plant them. Spring, early summer, or fall. But there are many that if I plant them in the spring, I may get zero to 10% germination. Planted in the fall, the next spring I may get 90% to 100% germination. So it varies by species, but if you want to get the absolute best germination of flowers, you would plant in the fall. So if your goal for your prairie meadow that you're creating from seed is to have perhaps more flowers than grasses, you're almost certainly going to plant the seed in the fall, September, October, November. If you're goal is primarily the warm season prairie grasses, you don't want to plant in the fall. You want to plant in May or June when that soil is warm and the conditions are best for the growth of those grasses. This is very, very important to achieve your goals. The timing of your planting. And the method of planting, as we talked about, you can do frost seeding, scattering in the spring, or very early spring, late winter, or in the fall as a dormant seeding you can also do that in May or June. On a small area, you can just take the seed, mix it with a carrier, use sawdust because it's usually cheap and easy to get at a sawmill, and that dilutes the seed so we can spread it across a larger area. If we're doing half an acre or an acre or five acres, then we use a machine, and I'll show you some examples of mechanical seeders. It's so much easier than lugging around pickup truck loads of sawdust and seed across acres. It's really very difficult to do it that way. And then there are small pull-behind seeds that you can get that will allow your seed to be distributed very accurately. And these cost about $300, and they'll go behind an ATV or even a lawn tractor because they're ground-driven by the wheels so you don't have to have a power take-off or anything. So it's a very economical way to plant fairly large areas without investing in, say, a $15,000 Truax drill, which is what we use on some of our larger seedings. So there's a lot of different ways to do that. So you have your planting time, fall, spring, or late winter, and your planting method, hand broadcasting or using larger types of seeders or a small pull-behind seeder. So it depends on the scale of your project, your budget, etc, as far as which of these you would choose. Step five, and commonly overlooked, is post-planting management. A lot of people think, oh, prairie, it's no maintenance. I just throw the seeds out and fairies come along and take care of everything for me. Right? Sure. Yeah. It's no maintenance. No. It's low maintenance. There is some maintenance required. So, generally, in the first growing season because these are perennials in your prairie mix, some of them may only grow one or two inches tall the first year. Some of them may grow five or six inches. If you have really good conditions, every once in a while you'll get some blooms in the first year, but that's rare. That's under very low weed pressure conditions. Usually we have lots of annual weeds that come up, and they can get five, six feet tall, while our prairie seedlings are two to three inches tall. What in the world do we do? Before those weeds get more than 18 inches tall, we whack them back to six inches in the first year. Keep them whacked back so the light can get down to our prairie seedlings. They're not going to grow well in the shade. If you let the weeds get five feet tall before you mow them, then what happens in the first season? You mow this huge amount of material and it buries your seedlings. Big problem. So don't let the weeds get more than 18 inches tall before you mow them back to six in the first year. So the first year we're going to mow three, maybe four times if we have a lot of rain. The second year, we start to have problems with biennial weeds, which invariably might show up. Things like sweet clover or Queen Anne's lace, wild parsnip, that wonderful plant that causes skin rashes. There's a lot of different biennials. Burdock, bull thistle, etc. We don't want them to get too large and overshadow our plants, and we don't want them to make seeds so that they might re-infest the area. So in the second year we typically keep the prairie mowed to 12 inches through the first half of the summer, usually until mid to end July. So typically in the second year we might mow it twice. And in the third year, that's when the fun begins because what do we get to do in the spring of the third growing season on our prairie? We get to burn it. That's really why we do this. Oh, it's ecological and we create lots of nice wildlife habitat and we save money, but, hey, we get to burn it. That's really fun. And, of course, there's some situations where you live in town and you can't burn or you have a restricted situation where it's hard to burn it or whatever, then we can substitute mowing as an alternative to burning. But the timing of the burning is critical. Burning is a wonderful tool, but if you misuse it, and I'm not talking about burning down houses, I'm talking about misuse it in a prairie situation, if you don't time it right, you will not get much or if any benefit from it. So how does burning work? How is that our magic bullet with the prairies? This was discovered at the University of Wisconsin here in Madison. When they did the first prairie restorations in the 1930s and the '40s, they had a terrible problem with invasions like bluegrass, Kentucky bluegrass. And it starts growth four to six weeks earlier than most of the warm season prairie flowers and grasses. So it locks up the soil growing environment. It locks up the nutrients. It locks up the moisture. It gets a huge head start because the prairie plants are still dormant wondering, oh, man, these bluegrass are taking over, and then they're kind of in second position trying to catch up. So the brilliant people managing the Arboretum said, hey, you know, these prairies used to burn. I wonder if we could use fire. Let's try that. So what they did was they waited until the bluegrass got up about three, four inches tall, actively growing, had taken energy out of its root systems, thus making a withdrawal on its bank account in stored energy. Most of your prairie flowers and grasses, which are warm season species, were still dormant under the soil or just starting to come up. So when they burned it, they whacked the heck out of the bluegrass, and this also applies to quack grass, fescues, other cool season grasses and cool season weeds like clovers, but their problem was primarily bluegrass. It completely burns off all the new growth. It's had very little time to send new energy back down into the roots by means of photosynthesis because it just made these new leaves. So it hasn't replenished the roots so the roots are now weakened. The prairie plants are either still dormant or just emerging so there's almost no damage done to them or very little damage, and it turns the soil, what color? Black. What happens when the sun hits black soil? Temperature skyrockets. The studies that I did at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay showed when we burned on May 1st in 1980, it was a long time ago when I was a student there, the soil temperature in the top inch four days later was 18 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than on an unburned plot right next door. The soil temperature in the top inch went up 18 degrees in four days. Four sunny days. Now, the whole advantage of this growing situation turns in favor of the prairie flowers and grasses. All the sudden the soil was cool and damp under that bluegrass, now it's black and hot and the prairie grasses and flowers go whoosh. They start growing like crazy. The bluegrass says, oh, man, it was so nice. It was like 70 before. Now it's 100 degrees. I give up. It doesn't kill it but the prairie flowers and grasses now are ascendant, and it's like magic bullet. So burning is our first choice if we can do it. Not only because it's fun because it really works. The timing is critical. If you burn too early, the bluegrass won't be up and growing and you won't hurt it. You'll actually probably help it. So you have to wait usually until late April in southern Wisconsin. When the buds of the sugar maple tree are opening, that's time to burn because the plants never lie. They're always, always coordinated. That will give you the best control of cool season weeds and grasses with minimal damage to your warm season prairie flowers and grasses. When the buds of the sugar maple, not the red maple, not the silver maple. They open seven to 10 days earlier. The sugar maple. If you can time your burning or your mowing to the same time as that, then you're going to have the best results. If you're mowing, you must mow right to the ground because you must remove as much as possible of that new bluegrass or quack grass or clover growth. You want to remove it completely to deprive those target plants, the enemy plants, of their new growth. Maximize the amount of material mowed off. If you can rake it off, that further exposes the soil and mimics the effects of burning as best as possible. So that's step five, post-planting management. I suppose you probably came here to look at some flower pictures and stuff maybe. Let's do some of that. So, first of all, let's look at, if I was to restore the vegetation of Wisconsin as of about 15,000 years ago, what would I have to plant? Approximately a mile of ice. Here we are. And you can see there we're just east of the driftless area, and you've got a nice lobe of ice coming down there from Canada. Why did the glaciers go back to Canada, by the way? Anybody here grow up on a farm? They went back to Canada to get more rocks.

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Believe me, if you've ever picked rocks out of a field, yeah. Yeah. So, as you look at the vegetation over the next 14,000 years, pine trees moved in, spruces moved in, then oak savannas came in, and then at the time of settlement prairies were here. This doesn't show the Wisconsin prairies very well, but we had a number of millions of acres, nothing like farther to the west, but we were kind of towards the eastern end of the prairie peninsula here as they call it. And this is perhaps the most important thing I'm going to show you today. This is the strength and the power of these plants. These are the roots. You can see that the bottom, that goes to eight feet deep. Your grasses are four, six, some of them are up as deep as seven feet, some of the bigger grasses will go seven or eight feet deep. Some of your flowers will go 10 feet and deeper, 15 feet, even 20 feet. What does that do for the prairie plants? It gives them reserves under the soil for bad times, energy, it also allows them to get moisture from the lower soil. Shallow-rooted plants can't compete with that. On average, prairie plants have about two-thirds of their living plant material underground. Underground in their bank reserves. That allows them to deal with very difficult times, like the drought we had in 2012. How many people here had prairie gardens in the drought of 2012? How did your prairies do? Did they hold up pretty well? Amazing. How did lawns do? A lot of lawns didn't hold up so well. Why? Because lawns typically don't have roots more than six to eight inches deep. They can't compete with plants with roots four, six, eight, 10 feet deep. So this is really the strength of the prairie, and this is what makes the prairie low maintenance. We combine the fibrous root systems of the grasses, you see how the grasses are there on the right side and the left side, with the taproots or the deeper roots of the flowers. Oops, wrong thing. And together they occupy the soil surface, and the grasses, those deep roots of the grasses, help control weeds because they occupy the surface of the soil. Where do weeds grow? They grow in open soil. So the grasses really do the work. This is a picture of the drought of 1988. By late June all these grasses, like quack grass and bluegrass, they had turned brown except the butterfly wheat. Why did the butterfly wheat seem to wonder where's the drought? Because it has a root like this. Eight feet deep. Oops, let's try that again. So it was able to survive because of these amazing deep root systems. Now, let's say I have a big acreage that I want to start a prairie. This is the large scale herbicide. We're probably not going to put cardboard down on five acres. I do have a client who was in a very sensitive wetland stream, watershed. They put down three acres of black plastic. Wow. What a royal pain. And what happens if you have lots of deer? They punch holes in the black plastic. And what comes up through the black plastic? >> Weeds. >> Weeds. Black plastic is really not my favorite choice. It's got all kinds of problems with it. In large projects we will use herbicides like glyphosate. Now, we sprayed this once. Can you see the middle of that area? See that green? What's that green? That's quack grass. You know. Yes. One spray won't kill quack grass. So we hit it two more times and it was nothing left. And this is what it looks like later in the season. And then you have a couple choices. You can use a no-till seeder, like this Truax drill. This is made for doing large acreages. If you have less than an acre, it doesn't even hardly pay to fire it up because big seed boxes and if you have small amounts of seeds it doesn't work very well. So for your average backyard, you're probably not going to get the Truax drill, but if you're doing five, 10, 20 acres, this is the machine. It's a no-till drill so it minimizes the amount of soil that's disturbed. So if you spend all this time killing the weeds you don't bring up all these weed seeds. Now, let's say you're going to do it the old fashioned way, you're going to get out the plow or the tiller or whatever, turn the soil over. This is somewhat self-defeating because you are going to bring up weed seeds, but if I have a terrible heavy clay soil, this can be beneficial, especially if it's compacted. I might want to actually work it up to improve the condition of that soil. Then I'll come in with a broadcast type seeder. This is a Brillion seeder. It's a wonderful machine. It's a Brillion Sure Stand. It's designed to plant alfalfa fields using alfalfa or clover seed with grasses. What we do is we modify it slightly to plant prairie grasses and prairie flowers because a lot of the flowers are not dissimilar from planting clover or other small flower seeds, small forage seeds. So this works extremely well. And here you can see these big packer wheels. There's two wheels, two sets of wheels. The first one crushes the soil and makes a nice seed bed, the seed falls down between the wheels, and a second wheel really pushes the seed into the soil. These are very heavy pieces of cast iron. And generally speaking, you should respect these machines and not mess around with them. What I would do is put it in a low range first gear, and rather than actually stop and inspect it, I would just get off the tractor and walk back and open up the hatch and see how the seed was doing as the tractor is crawling along. Until one time I missed and put my foot right under the wheels, and it kind of sucks you under and smashes your foot into the wheel. So that's really a farm accident waiting to happen. Fortunately I was not harmed, but I learned a huge lesson. Always stop the machine when you're going to inspect the progress in the seed box. But it really packs it in really well, let me tell ya.

LAUGHTER

It really does. Here's what the seed box looks like. The front box, which is pretty much empty, can you see those little rollers in there? That agitates the grass seed. We put the grass in the front box and any super large seeds, like some of your compass plant or prairie dock, these are big seeds, they won't fit in the back box. That's for the smaller seeds. That's for the clover seed or the alfalfa seed goes. But almost all of our wildflower seeds do very nicely in that little back box there on the left. So we put the grass seeds that are kind of fluffier and the larger prairie seeds, usually just the members of the genus Silphium, in the front box, and the flowers and the small round prairie grass seeds, like prairie dropseed or switchgrass, they go in the back box because they're smaller and rounder and they fit through that mechanism much better. So you have to make sure you put the right seeds in the right box. Pretty basic but very important. Let's say I have a smaller area. This is only a few thousand square feet. In this case, I've tilled it up, worked up the ground, and I'm going to distribute the seed by hand. I'm going to mix the seed with a carrier. In this case, I'm using sawdust or maybe peat moss. Sawdust is usually cheaper. Oftentimes you get it at a sawmill, they want to get rid of it. Sometimes they might charge you a little bit, like a buck a big bag or something. Mix it all together, and then you just go out and spread the seed by hand. It's feeding the chickens. We use about two bushels per thousand square feet, and we mix the seed and the sawdust all together. This is what you can do at your house all by yourself. Now, on very small areas, I will do this at my house. I have all these test plots where I torture plants because that's my job to see what they can take, and you can, rather than using this method, excuse me, we're going to look at this here. After you scatter the seed, you just rake it in just to get it just under the soil, and then you roll it. At my house, I will sometimes use the Neil Diboll drink and drive method.

LAUGHTER

Which I will note is restricted to my property. It's a hot day in July, I just finished planting this, and I drive my truck wheels back and forth and back and forth across the planted area. And of course by then you're ready for a brewski. I am not leaving the compound.

LAUGHTER

And I'm only going 30 feet back and forth. After a couple beers you can test your acuity as you drive that thing at.01 miles an hour going back and forth.

LAUGHTER

So, anyway, point being is you don't need all this fancy equipment to do this at home. As long as the soil is dry, you can run a tractor or a truck or whatever. So make sure the tractor does have a beer holder in it so you're safe.

LAUGHTER

Can you tell I'm from Wisconsin? And then we mulch it. Here we're using some clean straw to mulch the new planted area. Or on large areas, this is a 15-acre project we did down in northern Illinois, we used chopped and blown straw where you have a big trailer full of bales of straw and you feed it into a big bale chopper and it shoots it onto the job site to completely cover that soil because we want to hold the moisture in. This is kind of a clay soil so we want to retain that moisture in the ground, and clean straw is usually the cheapest, best way to do that. What's this going to look like? Remember it's going to take three to five years for your prairie to develop from seed. First year, in this case we used an annual rye nurse crop, which helps compete with the weeds, it doesn't compete terribly with the prairie plants when used at the right amount, and it prevents, this has been mowed, and in some other cases where we have more weeds, we will come in and mow it at six inches, at I talked about. Here we used an annual rye nurse crop that didn't control the weeds as well. There was more weed pressure in this site. So we keep the weeds mowed back to six inches. Three times usually in the first year. And by the second year, I tell my clients nothing for three years, the second year black-eyed Susan shows up. Thank God for black-eyed Susan, we're a year ahead of schedule. Under promise, over deliver.

LAUGHTER

So the biennial shows up, we're ahead of schedule, you're a genius. Yeah. Under really optimal conditions you can sometimes get some of the perennials to start to bloom in the second year. The grass is like --. It grows fast. Canada wild rye and Virginia wild rye are fast growers. Black-eyed Susan, bergamot, and coreopsis, some of these will come on in the second year under good conditions. But most of these will take until the third year. Now, years ago when we first started doing seed mixes, I decided that back when I started doing this 32 years ago, I remember everything I did 32 years, every plant I sold was a weed. These were all weeds. In fact, in Westfield a lot of local farmers called us the weed farm. And I told one of my friends, you come over and we'll walk my fields, and if you find one plant that's a weed in your field, I will eat it. And we walked like 80, 90 different species and not one of those plants in our fields were weed in his field. I didn't have to eat any prairie plants that day.

LAUGHTER

Because most of these are perennials, and they're relatively conservative and well behaved. So you very rarely will see them as weeds. In a garden situation, you want to be careful with some of them. Some of them are -- rhizomes and you want to be very selective about what you put in your garden. So what I did was I said, at that time, then you could just go out and collect seed along the side of the road, stuff it in a bag, and sell it. There were no rules or regulations. The seed was chaffy and had leaves and stems and stuff. It was terrible. I said, you know what? I got this fanning mill for 25 bucks at an auction, what happens if I put this seed through this? And, man, black-eyed Susan seed went from this chaffy mess to this pure black gold. So, wow, it's like 99.9% pure. I said, man, this is the best. Of course it meant that instead of having 20 pounds of black-eyed Susan I only had like four pounds of black-eyed Susan.

LAUGHTER

But it was almost pure seed. But I forgot to correct the quantities in the seed mix, and so I had a couple problems with that.

LAUGHTER

Hey, it's really good seed, but maybe a little bit too much. So we had to kind of make a few adjustments to the seed mixes. So by the third year, you start to see the early maturing perennials, like the yellow coneflower, the purple coneflower, the bergamot. These things start to come on, and that's the point you're really starting to think, yeah, hey, this is going to work. So I always tell my customers give it at least three years. Now, here's a job I did outside of Cleveland, Ohio. This was pure clay. They striped off the topsoil. The pH was 4.2 >> Oh, my. >> Yes. 4.2 is acid clay. To correct acid clay is very difficult. We limed it and limed it and limed it, and then we ran buckwheat, winter wheat, smother crops for two years to add organic matter. We planted this in September, and after three years they said, Neil, there's no flowers. There's no flowers. So I fly to Cleveland, crawl around on the ground, and we planted like 32 different species there, and there's these little plants growing in the clay, but they weren't big enough because they were struggling under these very difficult conditions. This is what it finally looked like after six years. What normally would have taken three years took six years. This was planted in 1985. This planting still stops traffic along this road 30 years later because they're perennials, and they're taking good care of it. They managed it well. They burned it every other year. But it took it twice as long, but once it got started it's doing great. I'm going to show you my house. The cobbler's children have no shoes.

LAUGHTER

As I said, I torture plants at my house. I had, 25 years ago when we moved to our place outside of Pardeeville, I had a 20-acre buckthorn farm. I now have about a one-acre buckthorn farm. So over the last 25 years, with some help from some friends and a lot of work, have cleared, I would say of that 20 acres probably 17 of it was buckthorn, and now we're down to like one. So I just keep plugging away. But this is what outside of the house, not far from the house, this is what it looked like. This huge mess of buckthorn. How many people have a similar situation like this? Not uncommon. I'm going to show you this. This is one of the most extreme conditions for you to convert to a prairie. So I cut down the buckthorn and then roped it up with a chain, I was a much younger man at the time, hauled it out of the woods, hooked it up to the truck, yee-haw, are we having fun yet?

LAUGHTER

And then made big bonfires. This is really just an excuse to have your buddies over, drink beer, and have a bonfire. A lot of work for just some beer and a bonfire, but it made great bonfires. Now, we used to have this Halloween party every few years, and we had this huge, giant bonfire like two stories high. I can't have the party anymore because I'm out of buckthorn.

LAUGHTER

I think my neighbor needs to start cutting some buckthorn. Yeah, baby. So, anyway, haul it up the hill, put it in a pile, and then nuke the bejesus out of it for two years. I just left all this stuff here. You can see a little prairie remnant. See there's a little Indian grass back there? That was there. These were once prairie hills a hundred years ago. And most of it had been invaded by oaks and then buckthorn and honeysuckle. It was terrible, terrible. I killed it off for two years until I just had this ugly, ugly mess. Then I got my big seven-horsepower Troy-Bilt horse tiller out there. Now, I'm on a dolomite ridge. It's rock. It's like 80% rock and a little bit of soil. So I'm like, okay, all I know is I've got to till up the ground, this is before I figured out no-till, I'm just going to take this thing across an acre and till it and till it and till it.

LAUGHTER

It went bunk, bunk, bunk, bunk, bunk. And of course it's bouncing off the rocks. These big tines bouncing off the rocks until I got, I don't know, a hundred yards and all the sudden it starts to go blub, blub, blub, blub, blub. Hmm, what's wrong with my tiller? And I went and looked and the cast iron intake manifold had broken clean off and was dangling there with a little bit of gas going through there. End of story. That's when I realized I'm just going to throw the seed on the ground just like nature does. And threw it on the ground and this is what I got. First year. A solid stand of sweet clover. This was a forest. This was a boxelder buckthorn forest. There was not sweet clover in there. Probably had not been sweet clover in there for 20 years That seed had laid dormant in that ground for 30, 40, 50 years. Who knows. They had goats here in the late '40s, early '50s. So these seeds had probably been there 40 years or more. When I opened it up to sun, even though I had sprayed it for two solid years, it came up to sweet clover. Now, here's my first year, okay? This is what it looks like at the end of the year. Hmm, wow, pretty prairie. So next year, second year, sweet clover is a biennial. I get this solid giant stand of sweet clover, six feet tall. Oh, my God. And all my poor little prairie plants are growing under that. They're there. So I mowed the whole thing down and left this beautiful looking landscape. I left the boxelder stumps so that when I mowed it I would bump into them with the tractor.

LAUGHTER

And here's the other thing. When you're mowing, the front tires will knock everything down before the mower comes. So I had to go backwards. So I'm sitting backwards in it and staring like this looking forward. And, of course, you always steer the wrong way and then you bump-bump into the boxelder stumps with the mower. I got it done. This looks horrible. This is my second year. I mowed down all the black-eyed Susans. There's like one black-eyed Susan right there, at the bottom. This is a disaster, but I know the prairie plants are there. They're going to make it. Third year, woo-hoo. Wow, yellow coneflowers, purple coneflowers. Wow, this is starting to look pretty good. My fourth year, pale coneflower, bergamot, still lots of black-eyed Susans. Black-eyed Susan is going to fade because it's a biennial. It needs open soil. After six, seven years it tends to fade out. Now all my perennials are coming on. Here it is again. Late in the fall, purple coneflowers, starting to get some rosinweed up there in the upper part, some goldenrod is coming in. And now I've got butterfly wheat showing up, pale coneflowers. This is, again, fourth year. And, again, this is fifth year. Now we've got the pale coneflower, and the white is wild quinine. These are both rare, endangered species in Wisconsin. Endangered because they drew a line where Illinois starts, south of there they're common, but they're politically endangered because they're in Wisconsin.

LAUGHTER

Hey, that's the way the game is played, folks. If we'd had the original boundary where the boundary of Wisconsin prior to 1836 or thereabouts was at the bottom of Lake Michigan, these would not be endangered species in Wisconsin, and we would have Chicago, Wisconsin.

LAUGHTER

Hmm. I'll let you decide that one.

LAUGHTER

Here I am in the 10th year. This is spring. Those were kind of more summery pictures. This is smooth --. So this in late May, early June, I have this beautiful white expanse. And I get into summer, now I start to get the coneflowers, the sunflowers, the wild quinines, and I've got insects and butterflies and birds. Absolutely unbelievable. Wonderful, wonderful. And here I am, again, this is year 15. I've got the coneflowers, the wild quinine, and this prairie now, this is going to be its 24th year, and it looks just great. I burn it every other year. Now, why do I burn every other year? Because if I burned every year, I will typically push the balance of the prairie more towards the grasses and away from the flowers. That's just the reality of how that works, especially when I'm doing that mid May, excuse me, mid-spring burning in late April, sometimes early May. I'm waiting until the warm season plants are just about to come up. So I'm going to work against some of the cool season flowers. So I do it every other year to maintain a balance between my prairie flowers and grasses while still setting back cool season weeds, cool season grasses, clovers, etc. I only do it every other year. If I wait three or four years to burn, and some people do, remember, I have a buckthorn delivery program called birds, and I'm surrounded on both sides by buckthorn. So those birds will come in and sit on the trees on the edge, poop the seeds, oh my, buckthorn. By burning every other year, those little buckthorn seedlings are almost invariably killed. If I wait three years or four years, now those seedlings of the buckthorn have sufficient root system to survive the burn, and I will not be able to kill them. So I have found that with a two-year, every other year burning schedule that I am able to keep buckthorn almost completely out of my prairie even though I'm surrounded by it and it could easily come in. Also, for the purpose of conserving invertebrates, butterflies, insects, arachnids, everything, if you burn everything in one year, the eggs, the chrysalises, cocoons, etc, sometimes the adults that these invertebrates are overwintering as will be destroyed in the burn. So I break my prairies into management units so I only burn one of those management years one year and rest the other. So I always have standing dead material for the insects to repopulate my prairies. I have prairies all over the place so I have to have a spreadsheet to keep track of my prairie burns. Let's see, I burned the prairie northwest two on April 28, 1993, and so on and so forth. So you keep track of it and make sure you rotate the burning and retain some of the plant material. Also for nesting birds, some nesting birds like fresh, new growth. Others like the old dead stuff from the year before. So you can create different habitat types to create different types of wildlife habitat. So you create more diversity with different management techniques and different burning schedules out of one prairie. So it just keeps going on. Here's my prairie going and going and going. And here's what it looks like in the fall. This is a little bluestem and Indian grass with that beautiful color with kind of the reddish and the yellow, the gold. Here you see another view across the house. All that grass burns good. Waitin' for spring. And here again you see the little bluestem in its fall regalia with those beautiful silver seeds. Indian grass in the background with its golden seed heads. And then the goldenrods. This is stiff goldenrod. A lot of people say, oh, goldenrod causes hay fever. Well, of course we all know it doesn't cause hay fever. It has the bad luck to bloom at the same time as ragweed. It's guilt by association, Your Honor, my client is innocent.

LAUGHTER

And of course, goldenrod has the big showy golden flowers, and ragweed has these really small nondescript flowers, and they're wind-pollinated which causes hay fever. The goldenrod is insect-pollinated and it's one of the most important insect foods late in the season for pollinators and the seeds of goldenrods are an extremely important food source of songbirds in the fall and winter. So if you're into birds, goldenrods are very, very important as a food source, and what's one of the most important foods for most birds? Insects. The prairie is unsurpassed at bringing in insects to feed the birds. So you create the whole ecosystem, the whole program is right there in the prairie. If your goal is butterflies as well, you want to make sure you have lots of native trees and shrubs because most of your butterflies utilize woody plants in the larval stage. Some, like the monarch, utilize the milkweed and some other prairie plants, and there are a number of species that do utilize the prairie plants at the larval stage. But many of your butterflies and moths definitely need trees and shrubs, and you can select those because it's well known as far as which species the different moths, butterflies, etc, utilize. And then in the winter, in a normal winter...

LAUGHTER

My little bluestem is still looking pretty good out there. This is actually after an ice storm. So I have this artwork in the snow and ice of my little bluestem. So there's something there all year round. So let's see if I can show you a little bit of maintenance. If I can't burn, I'm going to mow. This is mowed in late April. This is some study plots at the University of Wisconsin. We still manage these study plots. The left side has never been mowed. Now, 30 something years later, it's turned into a forest. I should get a picture of that. The right side is burned. And here's burning. Burning 101. Burning good, burning fun. That's why they call me Neil-anderthal.

LAUGHTER

Notice, I have a 15-foot wide green mowed strip. We mowed in the fall. Why was it mowed in the fall? So the mowed material would rot over the winter and not be flammable in spring. So I have this 15-foot wide firebreak. I'm burning against the wind. See how the smoke is going against the direction of the fire? The fire is going left to right; the wind is going right to left. Completely and utterly controlled boring fire. The way we like it, right? Yeah. So we just kind of work our way along. See the black line in the background? We're burning it in about 20-30 feet. Once we've got that black line in and there's no chance of it jumping, that's when the fun starts. Now we say let's put some wind on this baby. Whoosh. What was a six-inch flame is now a six-foot flame. Just add a little wind. Now this is getting a little more like it. I have firebreaks all around, I have a road here, I have a bicycle path where I'm standing, and I have mowed firebreaks on each side to the right and to the left. So this is completely under control. I have never lost a fire in all the years I burned, over 30 years. So, also, for controlling woody plants, this is a backfire. See how it's kind of slowly moving? That's a red pine. That red pine is now dead. I sizzled it. Fire will kill most of your pines, spruces, etc. It will not kill a lot of your deciduous trees and shrubs. They will simply resprout, but it helps to keep them in control. And make sure if you are burning and you don't want to lose a white pine tree, make sure you don't burn the white pine tree. We didn't care about this tree. We wanted to get rid of it. That's sad but, hey, it's a jungle out there. And this is my favorite tool, the drip torch. Put 80% kerosene, 20% gasoline, and go. We use this in California a lot. You didn't hear that from me.

LAUGHTER

And you just come along here and you've got the firebreak here and you put down a line of fire. And we do this usually in the evening because it's more controllable. The wind is coming into the screen. We've got the fire going against the wind more than a foot tall. Once we've got that going, then we can start to head fire it. It's getting a little bit higher. It's about one acre here. Then we add the big wind. Now we've got the wind going towards it, but remember, we've got the black line on the backside. So here are these 15-foot flames, no problem. And then, here we do it in the middle of the day. You don't want to do this at home. This is at the Arboretum in Green Bay. And we did about seven acres. We did a ring fire rather than this back line fire. We did a ring fire all the way around it. The wind is going this way, we started against the wind, and we came around and the wind came together and when that wind hits it, you start to get 30-foot flames. And if you're really lucky, you

get to see something like this

a fire tornado. Do not attempt this at home. Those are trees. Those trees are 30 feet tall. That's 75 feet tall. That lasts for three to five seconds. Isn't that the coolest thing? That's the biggest reason I can tell you to plant a prairie.

LAUGHTER

get to see something like this

So this is just some of the fun things you can do, on somebody else's property preferably. So I hope today this have given you some procedure, some hard information on really what's involved to get started to get your prairie through the five steps to be successful so that you can do this either on a small scale or a large scale on your property. Thank you so very much for coming today.

APPLAUSE