{"id":1292,"date":"2015-07-21T12:31:28","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T18:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=1292"},"modified":"2015-07-21T12:31:28","modified_gmt":"2015-07-21T18:31:28","slug":"queen-of-the-prairie-big-bluestem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=1292","title":{"rendered":"Queen of the Prairie: Big Bluestem"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"big-bluestem-CloudPav-7-21-15\"<\/a>\u00a0Why it’s called BIG bluestem: the pole is six feet tall
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Four grasses form the foundation of the tallgrass prairie biome in the US: Big Bluestem, Switchgrass, Indiangrass, and Eastern Gama.\u00a0 Before this land was broken to the plow, fingers of tallgrass prairie existed here in the wetter lower spots, with midgrass (Little Bluestem, Sideoats Grama, Vine Mesquite, etc)\u00a0 prairie on dryer slopes and shortgrass on the rockiest areas.\u00a0 This is not quite the southernmost bit of tallgrass country, but it’s getting there.\u00a0 When we bought the place, it had been farmed for cotton, corn, sorghum, and then “improved” pasture with non-native grass, and then overgrazed almost to the bare ground–was bare ground in places.\u00a0 One of our goals was to restore native grasses, including the big four.\u00a0\u00a0 There were patches of Little Bluestem here and there.\u00a0\u00a0 Larger patches of Indiangrass across the creek.\u00a0\u00a0 One or two Switchgrass clumps.\u00a0 But no Eastern Gama and no Big Bluestem.\u00a0\u00a0 We would see patches of it along some county roads, occasionally one in a field, usually a field left fallow for years awaiting development.\u00a0\u00a0 Twelve years earlier, when we first bought the house and its few acres, we’d established a “grass garden” for native grasses that we began to salvage from construction sites and where narrow country roads were about to be scraped and widened, destroying the plants alongside anyway.<\/p>\n

Big Blue is one of those grasses.\u00a0\u00a0 Each of the stands growing on our place now began as one spade’s worth of root division brought in and planted in the grass garden.\u00a0\u00a0 One by one, after we bought the 80 acres,\u00a0 9×9 inch square root divisions were individually planted here and there, seeking those places where they might thrive.\u00a0\u00a0 Some did well initially; others are still a small clump.<\/p>\n

The tallest, above, is in on four feet of black soil over white caliche\/rock mix over rock.\u00a0 (We know, from digging fence post holes and the foundation holes for the rain barn nearby.)\u00a0 This area was not farmed as intensively as the rest of the land east of the creek.\u00a0\u00a0 The rain barn’s 5000 gallon storage capacity means that even in the 5 drought years we could give it a little water every other week or so.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It was never heavily watered, but it had some help.\u00a0 It also had a top dressing of aged horse manure last year, in anticipation of a possible El Nino winter.\u00a0 Plenty of rain fell this spring and early summer.\u00a0 Here’s another:<\/p>\n

\"big-bluestem-Center-Walk-7-21-15\"<\/a>Two similar stands are in former plowed land & pasture; again, pole is 6 feet<\/em><\/p>\n

This big open field was badly overgrazed,\u00a0 with less than 20# grass coverage when we took it on.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s suffered erosion, and the soil type and depth vary widely from one side to the other.\u00a0\u00a0 At the high end,\u00a0 it’s a reddish-brown soil not more than a foot or so deep.\u00a0 Along both the north and south fencelines, where it wasn’t plowed, the black soil I suspect was original is still there in varying depths–deeper to the west, toward the creek, and thinner to the east.\u00a0 It had been terraced, more or less, some time in the past, and then planted with King Ranch Bluestem (non-native grass) as “improved pasture,”\u00a0 but had been overgrazed and badly invaded with nonnative forbs and Ashe juniper.\u00a0\u00a0 We took hundreds of junipers off the big field, and it’s still a chore to whack the babies that come up from seed.<\/p>\n

This stand of Big Blue is a ragged oval about 10 feet by 8 feet\u00a0 now and no longer needs the market stick we had with it for its first years.\u00a0\u00a0 It suffered badly in the drought (got no supplemental water) but came back strong this year.\u00a0\u00a0 Last year, before the rains began, it had fewer than ten flowering stalks; now they’re abundant (and not yet open, unlike those of the first picture.\u00a0\u00a0 Since not all the original root divisions were sourced from the same site (I think we started with four, within a 15 mile radius of here) the difference in flowering times could result from genetic differences in the original sources, or soil conditions.<\/p>\n

The other stand in the west grass\u00a0 is a little more robust; it was planted at one side of a stand of vine mesquite (a lower grass that likes more soil moisture)\u00a0 perhaps 50-60 yards from the tallest one and another 50-60 yards from this one.<\/p>\n

Of all the things we’ve accomplished, I think I’m happiest to have Big Bluestem back on this land, thriving, coming through the drought, and standing tall.\u00a0\u00a0 When we moved here, a very old man told me about working as a cowboy in his youth, driving cattle from water to water (the San Gabriel River to the Lampasas, west of here–just west, he said, of present-day US 183), and riding through grass so wall that the seedheads were almost as tall as he was, while in the saddle.\u00a0 This is the grass he remembered seeing one moonlight night, bending in the wind so it looked like waves, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Why it’s called BIG bluestem: the pole is six feet tall Four grasses form the foundation of the tallgrass prairie biome in the US: Big Bluestem, Switchgrass, Indiangrass, and Eastern Gama.\u00a0 Before this land was broken to the plow, fingers of tallgrass prairie existed here in the wetter lower spots, with midgrass (Little Bluestem, Sideoats […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,21,7],"tags":[54,70,42],"class_list":["post-1292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activities","category-photography","category-plantlife","tag-grass","tag-photography","tag-prairie-restoration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1292"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1292"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1295,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1292\/revisions\/1295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}