Fall, 2013 versus August, 2020...
I'm getting ready to do a lot of planting, as soon as we get some rain and the weather turns toward autumn. I will be replanting the areas I worked on in 2013-14, when I had the Palouse Conservation District grant. I realized about four years ago that, while I had made a substantial effort to accomplish the planting of the southeastern half of my property in the allotted two-year window, I had not gotten enough results to keep the weeds out. Much of what I had purged was gone, but the area was overrun with annual grasses and persistent weeds like prickly lettuce, salsify, and storksbill coming back.
The fact is that you cannot transform a weedy patch into prairie in a couple of years. In addition, I had tested my theory about planting seeds by raking them into to the top 1/4 inch--the standard method among native plant folks, I guess. I had to wait to find out (see earlier posts about "rake vs. divot"), but in fact, a lot of seed that I got from that grant was essentially wasted. I got not a single sticky geranium, no gaillardia, no helianthella. The grass seed did OK being raked in that way, but most of the flowers and small plants seem to need soil to be turned over about eight inches deep and softened up. These divots I have put in over the last five years have been very successful. There are now a lot of patches of silky lupine, delphinium, collinsia, midget phlox, etc.
For the last several years I have mowed and mowed the annual grasses, and then in the last year, it seems I have finally eradicated it. This odd pandemic period has meant that I could keep up with the spraying, too. Especially with the prickly lettuce, it has been a lesson in persistence. That biennial starts coming up in April, then another wave in June, and they continue to surface. I went with glyphosate in May, a round of 2,4-D in June, and in late July there was another pass with glyphosate. I have to hit. every. plant. But of course it can be tricky, because I have to dodge a lot of very nice plants. I just pulled three prickly lettuce today, but they are now rare.
I have been madly collecting seed, and I purchased twenty pounds of fancy local native grass seed from BFI in Moses Lake, WA. I have also purchased some seed from Thorn Creek Native Seeds in Moscow, ID, and I still have some collecting to do--cinquefoil, collomia, and scarlet gilia have not yet produced ripe seed. I am hopeful that I won't be killing an assault of noxious weeds in October, that I will have raked a lot of this back and been able to create many divots of fabulous natives. I think that having the seeds in the ground in October would be far better than the almost-December I get to most years.
Always hopeful.
