Much like my heroine Fern in The Witch of the Meadows, I’ve been involved in a meadow restoration on open space land adjacent to our property in the mountains of Colorado. This year, maybe with a bit more magic, those efforts will be as successful as Fern’s.
Back in April, I worked with local restoration specialists to select a seed mix for the half acre adjoining a creek, on a semi-dry 8-10% slope facing northwest. It doesn’t get sun more than 8 hours a day, and can’t be watered. Considering next to no rain fell in July and August, it was incredible that anything survived the May planting.
The other open space team member raked the seed in well, and most of it stayed in place during Colorado’s spring rains. We have some bare patches to reseed this fall, but I’m thrilled to see how the planting turned out.
What we planted.
Again like Fern, I’m a wildflower fanatic. I loved researching the plants to use. By looking up the USDA plant data sheets, I got heights on the plants recommended in a general seed mix and selected the shortest plants—some get 40 inches or taller! Because this land is completely within ‘zone 2’ of my cabin’s fire mitigation, so I wanted to keep the plant height to 30 inches or less. Then the restoration specialist selected the percentage of each to put in the mix, totaling 60% grass, 40% forbes.
Grasses
Seven grasses were included, one of them a sterile grass that promotes stabilization the first year. These are all bunch grasses, not the spreading, lawn-types. So far, I’m seeing plentiful starts of Little Bluestem.
In lesser numbers, Squirreltail and possibly a Junegrass are growing.
I’m not a grass expert, so might have missed others that haven’t seeded this year. I hope Blue Grama, the state grass of Colorado, is among them!
Forbes
The wildflowers that were short, available and recommended narrowed my list to four species. All of them came up.
Prairie Sage, Artemisia ludoviciana, is the grayish plant that is everywhere. It didn’t flower this year.
Blue Flax, Linum lewissii, didn’t flower either, but the delicate stalks with feathey leaves can be seen among the others.
Black-eyed Susan, Rudbeckia hirta, and Blanket Flower, Gaillardia aristate, which has similar leaves, made brave attempts at flowering, but the resident deer are loving those buds.
What also grew.
Seed contaminates! I eliminated some seed from consideration because of the contaminating plants. Two known contaminates I let in were Amaranth and Lamb’s Quarters.
I pulled all I found, but they had already gone to seed, so we’ll be dealing with them for a while.
We have a number of volunteers. Familiar species that have been in the area included evening primrose, aster and horseweed.
Other new plants, I suspect may be seed contaminants. Witchgrass, which is a good grass, I’m told, nightshade and common stork’s-bill.
And some not so welcome!
Bindweed—the scourge gardeners everywhere!–but it is native, as is Buffalo Bur, but look at the size of these stickers!
Purslane and Malva sp, which both apparently spread.
Cowpen daisy and dogweed. These names kind of tell you they might be invasive…and though pretty, looks like they are.
I also found 3 kinds of mustards: tumble mustard, shepard’s purse and field penny-cress.
A little more history if you’ve read this far.
This wasn’t our first seeding effort. (I’m trying not to make this article complicated, but honestly, it’s been a long process!)
Following a flood in September 2013 that swept away the land, contractors stabilized the creek banks, replaced top soil and reseeded. Unfortunately, the seed was contaminated, so thick plastic was spread over the area to snuff out invasive thistle and cheat grass.
That was September 2018. We allowed 18 months of plastic coverage, from September 2018 to May 2020. So far, it looks like that was enough to kill out the cheat grass; I’ve found only a few springs.
Apparently, thistle seed lasts longer. The seeded area was overrun with it.
We cut off the flowers, then worked on soaking the ground to dig out the crowns and roots. In total, we removed 9 contractor garbage bags of thistle.
Because of the pandemic, we delayed our trip west until fall when we felt able to continue our social distancing precautions. Next year, I hope to be there for more of the growing season and attempt to control what is growing. After seeding in only 11 species, it is daunting that we had over 30 different kinds of plants grow in the four months after the plastic was removed.
This is a lot of information on the plants I identified growing on the property, but I hope it helps other native plant gardeners on this journey to restoring wild places.
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