Nebraska Master Naturalists in the NEWS!
Nature Conservancy workers and volunteers spend hours harvesting grasses by hand to ensure a supply of seeds for planting new prairies
PHOTOS FROM KEARNEY HUB
Posted: Saturday, July 16, 2011 11:00 pm |
Updated: 11:53 pm, Fri Jul 15, 2011. By LORI POTTER Hub Staff Writer Kearney Hub
WOOD RIVER — Dickcissels hiding in tall grasses sang on a hot, humid Saturday morning as five seed gatherers slowly walked through a prairie southwest of Wood River.
The Nature Conservancy’s Mardell Jasnowski and Nanette Whitten and volunteer Jim Peters of Lincoln used scissors to clip slender wheat grass seed heads. Dan Glomski, assistant director of the Nebraska Nature and Visitor Center at Alda, and volunteer Will Goding of Grand Island used their thumbs and index fingers to strip wedge grass seeds from stems.
The slow, repetitious work is necessary to have the ingredients for the seed mixes desired for planting into other prairies next year, said Jasnowski, operations assistant for TNC’s Eastern Nebraska Project Office at Aurora.
Last Saturday’s harvest was on Crane Trust land along Denam Road south of the Platte River. Most of TNC’s monthly volunteer work days to collect seeds and do other prairie management work are at the conservancy’s Dahms-Derr Tract restored prairies two miles south of the Wood River Interstate 80 exit.
That site’s west prairie was seeded from 1999 to 2002, and the east side, a native Sandhills prairie, was seeded in 2002. There are trails for public hiking and parking in a graveled driveway at the brick Derr house.
“There are usually five to six people” helping on work days, Jasnowski said. “A lot of them lately have been from the Master Naturalist Program.”
The program, which is offered across Nebraska, recently started a new training session in the Grand Island and Kearney area.
Volunteer hours are a program component and a good fit with work needed at TNC’s prairies. “That’s been a real plus for us, to use those people,” Jasnowski said.
Anyone can help at the June-through-October work days. She said work often is scheduled on the second Saturday of a month, but the timing depends on when plants have seeds ready for harvest.
Weather affects scheduling of outdoor work and determines how quickly plants mature.
“Native plants, just like everything else, got a late start this year because it was cool and wet,” Jasnowski said. “Now, there’s kind of this mad rush because everything is coming (to harvest) at once.”
“We’ll accept volunteers anytime,” she added. “If somebody has a day off and wants to come out, we’ll meet with them.”
The early July focus was on plants in wet or moist soils, including sedges and the slender wheat and wedge grasses harvested last Saturday, and on a few flowering plants, such as spiderwort.
TNC officials manage prairie diversity with prescribed burns, grazing, and some herbicide control and cutting of trees and invasive weeds. The tools used and their timing depend on annual conditions.
“It’s different every year,” Jasnowski said.
Although TNC has a seed collector that can be pulled through large stands of sedges, she said most seed gathering must be done by hand.
“With some seed, you just have buckets strapped to you or that you carry with you,” Jasnowski said. Species such as slender wheat grass can be cut as single stems or in bunches, with the entire heads going into the bucket. Others plants must have the seeds stripped from the stems.
Whitten, a Texan, is TNC’s seed collection specialist. She first came to south-central Nebraska three years ago as a volunteer who wanted to work in prairies, but away from the Texas heat.
Jasnowski said TNC obtained grants to pay for Whitten to do prairie and seed processing work for six months this year.
“We usually keep the seeds separate and in the fall, when we’re ready, we’ll mix to where it will go,” she said, whether the site is a wetland or higher ground.
Seed processing involves use of a screen to remove foreign material. It’s a job Whitten focuses on during rainy days at a nearby TNC seed barn.
Jasnowski said seeds harvested last Saturday probably will be used in 2012 near the Dahms-Derr Tract, where dirt work is being done to create sloughs. “That’s why we want grasses and sedges,” she said, adding that this is a good year to harvest seeds from plants that thrive in moist-to-wet soil.
Places where different or a more diverse mix of plants are desired will be overseeded. That commonly is done in February and March, preferably on top of snow that can provide good starter moisture, Jasnowski explained.
Some of the 2011 harvested seeds will be shared with Aurora’s Prairie Plains Resource Institute.
According to the institute’s website, its goal since 1980 has been to preserve native Nebraska habitats. Native prairies and wetlands are restored and maintained on institute land, and on other private and public lands for use in community education, recreation and sustainable economic development.
email to:
lori.potter@kearneyhub.com
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