Grasslands SBG - Strategic Mowing for Meadows

Strategic Mowing for Meadows Jennifer Ceska, Conservation Coordinator State Botanical Garden of Georgia, 2012 Athens, Georgia jceska@uga.edu “When are you going to mow down those weeds?!” My husband Patrick and I can’t tell you how many times we heard this question when we first started managing our meadow in 2004 by strategic mowing. In the last four years we’ve experienced a change in tone with questions like, “can we pick berries on your land?; can I walk your paths to look at your flowers?; and can I run my dogs through your meadow because there’s so much wildlife in there!” Now, I think the last question was a joke, but I had to say a blushing yet resounding, “no, please,” further explaining that I didn’t want the dogs either squashing my flowers or scaring my rabbits and field mice. And my reputation as the crazy-plant-lady was once again reinforced but wonderfully so!

When we started, we did notice that our neighbors kept their areas very closely trimmed and tight around all the edges, even along the creeks to the water’s edge. But we’d had a different vision, learned from our friends Nick and Suzie Williams of Savannah while visiting their cabin in Highlands. Nick mowed their land once a year, usually in the very late fall. Sometimes he’d miss a year or would mow in late winter. For his family, he regularly mowed meandering paths so that they could walk through the area easily, and so “folks wouldn’t be tramping on their wildflowers and orchids!” The place is beautiful with diversity. And the paths welcome strolling and exploration, games of chase, hide-and-seek, and epic egg hunts.

Patrick and I have a site that was cow pasture probably as late as the 1940s. We still find barbed wire and rusted cowbells. We have rock piles in several areas indicated the labor used to clear the land.

The site had the usual pasture characters like Barnyard Grass, Tall Fescue, Bermuda, and Foxtails, but we also saw a few beauties like Little Bluestem, Ironweed, and Joe-pye Weed. We had a model for what we wanted, and by the spring of 2005 we had mown paths around the site, targeting our paths through stands of Japanese Honeysuckle shorn regularly as we mowed those paths. The paths can be seen on Google Maps satellite images even, and our son and dog have run miles and miles along those paths, looping on bike and racing like the wind.

Over the next several years, we noticed a real reduction in common pasture grasses and a true increase in the numbers of warm-season-grasses. We reduced the area we mowed annually, allowing a border of Sumac, Alder, Sassafras, and Hazelnut tuck in at the edges. Blackberries stitched themselves along the edges. Patrick still hand clips new blackberry canes out of our main meadow, hitting them with loppers a couple of rounds every year so they don’t get too hard a hold over the entire site. We had lovely forbs like Black-eyed-Susan, Maryland Goldenaster, Cutleaf Coneflower, and Bearpaw, hugging the forest edges. Every fall, we’d grab a few handfuls of seeds, and let the seeds drop as we walked across the meadow. In two years, we had these species across the entire site. Eight years later, we now see a large increase in the numbers of native peas on site, with charming Lespedezas and resourceful Desmodiums throughout the entire site instead of just on the forest edge. And species that I didn’t have proper respect for like, Lyre-leaf Sage, Small’s Ragwort, and Partridge Pea made the most elegant cascades of lavenders and yellows, taking turns filling the entire meadow with a blanket of each species’ flowers. We had never seen them en masse, and the effect was truly beautiful! I remain humbled after being such a botanical snob to these more common wildflowers.

Strategic mowing is a proper form of habitat restoration, and it is applied regularly to reduce invasive species and to promote understory diversity in grasses and forbs. It is true that strategic mowing takes longer than prescribed fire, but properly timed mowing does help restore prairie habitat.

Truly brutish thugs like Multiflora Rose, Johnson Grass, and Bull Thistle need to be aggressively treated,

and most effectively by spot spraying herbicide. We had our first bout with Sericea Lespedeza 2011, and had to spray them out this summer. It was shocking how quickly they spread on site in one year. But other than that, and annually adjusting our paths to mow down patches of Honeysuckle, our site has now restored to a majority of native forbs and grasses by mowing once a year with a push mower. The timing of the mowing is critical if you are mowing for wildlife. In a recent conversation, Dr. Elizabeth Doxon, a wildlife biologist and researcher at the Center for Native Grasslands Management at the University of Tennessee, explained that mowing once during the transition between winter and spring is ideal. For Georgia, this is usually late February or very early March. In the winter, many species of birds take cover from the elements under the decaying umbrellas of prairie forbs. She taught us to notice how many widflowers in prairies lose their basal leaves while flowering and fruiting, creating umbrella-like canopies along the ground. Swallows, finches, and many migrating song birds will hide from prey and weather in these “meadow-houses.” Prairies provide ground nesting birds with spaces to nest, brood, and bug with their young. The key to timing mowing is to mow before the ground birds nest and then not again through the summer so that birds can continue to rear and brood their young in the meadow.

At the SBG, you can see strategic mowing implemented as the staff target restoring the old flower display areas under the powerline ROW on the hill to a Piedmont Prairie. Non-native woody specimens were transplanted by machinery from this area. Now the staff is working to create a “Prairie on the Hill” complete with widely mown 8 foot paths, interpretation stations, and a picnic area nestled right in the middle. If you go there now, you will see where the SBG Horticulture Staff has already initiated strategic mowing, and the SBG Conservation Staff has begun spraying out truly thuggish invasives like Johnson Grass. Some of this spraying will leave behind bare patches of soil, but Dr. Doxon showed us that small areas of bare soil are important for birds and native bees. The SBG teams hope to accelerate the restoration of the Prairie on the Hill by prescribing fire, planting plugs, and distributing seeds collected locally.

Private landowners can do the same activities on their land, strategically mowing annually in the late winter, carefully removing thugs, and walking mown paths. Try these techniques and even try planting out Pocket Prairies as demonstrated around the new SBG Horticulture Complex. Meadows and pocket prairies are important for wildlife, and especially in urbanized areas, and they are beautiful in all seasons with their layers and diversity, textures, and movements.

To Make A Prairie

By Emily Dickinson, 1755 To make a prairie it takes a cover and one bee, One clover, and a bee.

And reverie.

The reverie alone will do, If bees are few.