Pasque flower Friday. #prairie

Prairie smoke at sunset. A stunner. Grown from hand-scattered seed. #prairie #nativeplants

If you're looking for experts on Mountain Lions, go to the comment sections on Facebook today. You will find hundreds of them.

Portrait or landscape? #pasqueflowers #prairie #nativeplants

Look what I found today. {zoom in} #pasqueflowers #prairie #nativeplants

Gonna step outside the prairie lane here and yell at the NBA for starting central time zone playoff home games at 845 pm.

New lock screen. #prairie

I’m up to 8 flowering Pasque flowers and 12 blooms. I am also finding new sprouting leaves where I transplanted my first year seedings last fall. When I started this, I had a goal: 1,000 blooming Pasque here I come.

Post burn plant ID ➡️ Prairie Alumroot. (Heuchera richardsonii) I burned just after snowmelt, but the alumroot already had green basal leaves. When burned they turn an orange color that is very easy to spot. I have found way more than I knew were out there.

Cold front came through. Pasque says I’ll just take a nap for a couple days.

I had a used wooden purple martin house for 5 years with no luck. It was ‘cleanable’ but not practical to clean out if that makes sense. I’d get martins to visit but they never stayed. The old wooden house fell apart last year so this year I’m trying gourds. Wish me luck!

A very underrated moment of spring: hearing first frog calls.

Porcupine grass (Hesperostipa spartea)… have you gotten it to grow from seed in a reconstruction? Care to share your thoughts? Success? Failures? I’ll go first. ⬇️ #prairie #nativeplants

Just down the road from my house is a sliver of forgotten land that still holds on as a little patch of #prairie. Pasque flower (Anemone patens).

Burning off my blue grama lawn. Yes, we still have snow - it’ll be all gone by Monday.

Are you also gearing up for Bombus queen season? The ladies are already flying around Chicagoland, so I collaged together the queen IDs from Colla, Richardson, & Williams for quick reference. See the full pdf here on @xercessociety.bsky.social : www.xerces.org/sites/defaul...

Conservationists face grueling conditions, low pay, & a rising mental health crisis. On the Mongabay Newscast with @mikedigirolamo.bsky.social, Jessie Panazzolo discusses "eco-grief" & why the industry must stop exploiting passion to build a more sustainable future for those protecting the planet.

And read Juliano et al.'s study of the connections between plant diversity and soil microbial diversity: doi.org/10.1002/ecs2...

Spoiler - this restored tallgrass prairie is @nature.org Nachusa Grasslands and the research shows correlations between plant and microbe beta-diversity, but not alpha-diversity! @science.nature.org @dochpjones.bsky.social + amazing co-authors not on bluesky

I decided I wasn’t going to start any plants inside this spring because I’d be away from home too much. And then my buddy said ‘hey, I have too many green milkweed seeds germinating in the fridge and I don’t have room for them’. So, here they come. Green milkweed - Asclepias viridiflora. #prairie

"Native plants matter because ecosystems are built from relationships, not individual species. Most insects, birds, and other wildlife cannot survive on...greenery. They depend on... native plants to feed... complete their life cycles." nativeplantecosystems.com

All the snow melted So I burned this prairie planting Then red flag warnings Now winter storm warning {all in about 9 days}

Highly recommend. youtu.be/FLWCsw9CdcI

brb, gonna build ai goggles that show you what the #prairie would’ve looked like.

First burn of the year for me. I’ve been trying to burn this river bank every year. Ive noticed more forbs and sedges each year and less smooth brome. I want to try clethodim this year to target the brome even further and allow the native sedges more opportunity to expand.

Days are longer. Temps above freezing. Less clouds. More sun. Seed. Life. More.

Sometimes, without warning, I’ll tell someone to plant bur oaks.

This was an interesting read. theprairieenthusiasts.org/karrikins-an...

Those colors

Happy Solstice!

New study: backyard mosquito sprays lead to insecticide levels high enough to kill pollinators, and sprays travel easily into neighboring yards. stacksjournal.org/article/ande...

It’s going to be 60 degrees warmer today than two days ago. That’s a lot of degrees.

Great article by @danamilbank.bsky.social on hidden eastern grasslands and the organizations helping to discover, conserve and restore these high-diversity carbon sinks. Gift link, so there should be no paywall. Mentions www.segrasslands.org, cliftoninstitute.org, and others. wapo.st/4pSK2Y2

Boy, retraction is the thing these days. After years of critique, a foundational 25-year old paper on the safety of glyphosate herbicide has been pulled. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/2

With the first snowfall of the year happening today, I mowed a last-second fire break in my prairie last night in the dark. This will set me up for an April fire next spring on 1/2 the site. It will be the first fire for the restoration.

Kind of an interesting picture. This is the view out my bedroom window of the northern lights from last night.

WOW wowoweoeo wow #northernlights

More evidence dispelling the seed bank myth that falsely leads practioners to believe that it's an insurance policy against distruptive disturbances to old-growth communities--disturbances that often deliberately prescribed. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Holy smokes, the #northernlights were dancing tonight.

It was a good day to make #prairie today. A good sized one too: 200+ acres. We’ll finish seeding over the next couple days.

Good luck, and I’ll see ya in the spring! I’ve been moving all the Pasque flowers that I grew in a raised bed on my patio and into my #prairie restoration. They did excellent this year - biggest ones I’ve grown yet. Some have a shot at flowering in year 2.

New paper led by former post-bac researcher Isabelle Turner, with @chriscatano.bsky.social: Seeding density alters the role of soil moisture in structuring plant abundance during prairie restoration onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Few pics of the #moon from last night.

I remember when 60° used to be the day time high in October. Now, it’s the overnight low temp. 👀

Hill’s thistle (Cirsium pumilum var. hillii), one of our native thistles, found blooming on a native prairie hillside today. Spectacular plant.

The algorithm that controls my ‘thumbprint’ radio on pandora should be studied. Soooo good. 🎶🎸🥁🎵

Pretty sweet #prairie hill full of dotted blazing star (Liatris punctata).

I’ve been picking #prairie seed a lot lately. Today, I filled up this cup with downy gentian seed pods.

Tonight’s #prairie restoration view is a bit different. This is a baby snapping turtle that I found crawling away from the prairie and towards the river. Since my dog was very interested in it, I decided to bring it down to the river myself and let it go.