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Native Warm Season Grass

The gama I planted just by stepping them into the saturated soils is not looking to shabby!! I have little doubt that I would have better germination had they been planted as deep as corn, but that was not an option with the weather and time permitted. There are 2 red circles that show the young gama popping up.

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Last fall I had to kill a beautiful 2 year old stand of alfalfa in a field I enrolled in the CRP program. I sprayed it with 2 quarts of 2-4D and 2 quarts of glyphosate and it appeared to nuke the whole field. This spring on the headlands where i turned it looks like this...

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But in the rest of the field much of the alfalfa is "returning from the dead"!!

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This spring I re-sprayed with glyphosate and Panoramic but it merely burned it temporarily and the darn stuff just keeps making a comeback!

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If you need to kill a strong robust stand of alfalfa...don't spare the horses! Go the max rates and then some... ;)

Here's an example of what fields would like like without Panoramic....sprayed on the left and unsprayed on the right

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Only the occasional random weed in the sprayed area

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One thing about a clean field...you can tell if any NWSG seedings come up...pretty slim pickin's so far

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Cold wet spring weather doesn't warm up this ole clay very fast but those with sandy loam soils may find some seedlings have emerged.

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90 degree weather should get the seedlings popping up soon though.... :way:
 
June 14th, 2011

So much for "normal" summer weather in SE Iowa! Torrential rainfall continues, much of it localized heavy rain that keeps soils waterlogged and cooler then normal. The water logged soils keep tiny seedlings from sending roots downward as the oxygen starved plants slowly drown.

Obviously all areas of the country are not experiencing this, so NWSG emergence will vary widely but since NWSG thrives on hot, humid and dry weather...cool wet weather is not helpful in establishing a new NWSG seeding.

Emergence is very slow but because mine was drilled I can just barely start to "row" it in some places on hill sides

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the Panoramic is keeping it clean thus far but relentless rainfall will eventually push the herbicide below the effective area.

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Cool wet weather slows down an already slow process so patience is even more important if your establishing NWSG during cool wet years... ;)
 
Hey guys I am glad I ran into your forum. I am in Illinois but I thought I would tell you about my NWSG patch that I have started this spring. I hit the sod with round-up and Plateua and drilled the seed with a rented drill. The area lays to the north of my house and I had been mowing twice a week for the three years that we have lived at the property. I decided I would rather have something more to look at than just mowed grass and thought I would give this a try for the birds and any other critter that can benefit from the planting. I used a mix from a local Quails Unlimited group and the partridge pea is shooting threw the best but I am finding lots of other seedlings pushing through. Keep the forum going, I found more ideas on here then anywhere else. I will try to attach some pics sometime.
 
June 28th, 2011

This is drilled in NWSG seedling growth on June 20th...the rows are still very faint but more noticeable

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Those seedlings are in a field treated with Panoramic so imagine trying to find seedlings in a field of foxtail and weeds?? Not going to happen...so one is better off to find something more constructive to do then look for NWSG seedlings the first year. ;)
 
July 10th, 2011

AJ sent in some great pics of his NWSG seeding in which he used Plateau/Panoramic herbicide and missed a spot here and there!

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It's easy to see how bad the foxtail would have been if not for the use of herbicides!

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The beginnings of a great stand of NWSG...150 acres worth I might add! :eek: :way:

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Thanks AJ! :)
 
Everyone has different weed problems depending on where you live, but one of the most difficult for me to deal with is pigweed! That stuff is hard to keep at bay in my neck of the woods and surprisingly where I applied Panoramic heavier on the headlands the pigweed seemed to thrive?

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It's really not thick enough to cause any serious competition with the NWSG seedlings but I clipped it off just above the average native grass height.

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From early July...approximate NWSG growth, imagine if it was buried i a sea of foxatil!

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The alfalfa I sprayed last fall with glyphosate and 2-4d is starting to get sick from the Panoramic

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Constant heavy spring rains pushed the poison deep into the soil and even though alfalfa is supposed to be Plateau tolerant, it's slowly dying.

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If it were a grass only stand I could easily have killed the pigweed and alfalfa with 2-4D but with forbs in the stand 2-4D is not an option. Switchgrass and Big Bluestem are a little easier to establish because they are tolerant of herbicides like atrazine and minus the forbs 2-4D can be used.

In this case I left the switchgrass out so I could apply the Panoramic at higher rates and will frost seed it into the stand this winter... :way:
 
July 27th, 2011

The following are some examples of clipping weeds in NWSG seedings because it's very important not to "mow" the seedlings off close to the ground. NWSG can be killed by repeatedly mowing or grazing to close to the soil surface so while mowing frequently the first year is an effective means of controlling competitive weeds...use caution to keep the mower up so that it's passing over the top of the young seedlings as much as possible.

In this case pigweed came up despite the use of Panoramic herbicide and while was not thick enough to really compete with the NWSG I really didn't want it to go to seed either.

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In each photo you can see the young NWSG is not cut but the much taller broadleaves are chopped off

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I used a brush cutter/bush hog type mower and the young grasses tend to push downward under the rotating blades while the heavier broadleaf plants where cut off

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In this case the pigweed could have been easily killed with 2-4D but I would have also killed the forbs in the NWSG mix, so I elected to simply clip them off

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Tens of thousands of acres of NWSG has been established over the years simply by clipping weeds off 2-6 times the first summer so where budgets don't allow for the use of herbicides, mowing is a viable option....just keep the mower high enough to cut as few of the NWSG seedlings as possible while still allowing in sunlight be removing the weed canopy.... :way:
 
We've got an area of old pasture that hasn't been grazed in 15-20 years. We did two late spring burns to this area in the past 4 or 5 years and the results were noticeable and we saw prairie returning immediately but it was obvious it was going take something more than fire to get rid of the thick brome.

Here is part of the area before we did any burning
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This spring we burned March 4th and allowed the brome to green up the entire month of March and most of April. On April 24th we came in and sprayed the brome with round-up. This was pushing it for us as the prairie was starting to wake up at this time but the green shoots hadn't opened up completely on the prairie plants and they weren't harmed by the round-up. The brome however was knocked back really well. Here you can see the edge of the area we treated the brome
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And today, as of July 25th, we've identified many prairie grasses, flowers, and other plants! We seeded switch grass in the areas that had thick brome, hoping to have it fill in next year.
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Killing the brome really opened up the ground floor for those grass clumps and left a nice open prairie floor for young birds
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Main grasses are:
big blue stem
side oats gama
with a little indian grass, little blue stem, and switch grass

Flowers and forbs identified so far are:
partridge pea
canada golden rod
pale purple cone flower
lead plant
thin vervain
hoary vervain
horse nettle
wild begamot
common milkweed
along with other plants we are working on identifying

Here are some pictures of the flowers, there are always bees in the flowers it seems
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Burning late really helps restore a native prairie but in extreme cases, like ours, use of round-up at the right time seemed to really help things! But be very careful... application at the wrong time could end up doing much more harm than good.
 
Grazon and NWSG

My "by the book" NWSG planting this year, using Plateau, etc, has been hijacked by a broadleaf matt of Primrose Willow allowing for only scant grass growth. I hit the willow again mid summer with another 6oz's of Plateau which seems to have done nothing but amuse it. But in preparing other sites for planting NWSG next year, I have found that Grazon P+D melts it. I have not tried 2,4-D on this weed, but my experience has been 2,4-D sucks on anyting that has more than ten minutes of root growth.

So, does anyone have experience using Grazon P+D or GrazonNext on NWSG's, either new or established stands? Will they tolerate it and at what stages of growth? I would use Oust XP next spring, but I am pretty sure I will need to overseed to thicken up this marginally successful start. I have seen several posts discussing Milestone which, like GrazonNext, is aminopyralid, although I think it may be a slightly different acid (carboxylic vs. acetic?). But, it does sound like Milestone and GrazonNext are essentially interchangeable.

Thanks for any experiece with Grazon. In the meantime, I am testing atrazine on the willow.
 
Well we jumped head first into the world of native warm season grasses this year when our property qualified for the general crp enrollment. I had to do a little convincing but I think it was the best thing we could do for our property. Since, everything I know about these grasses I learned right here on this thread I thought I would share what the place looks like as of august 1st.

Our property is basically as sandy as you can get. We have some sand hills that literally didnt have weeds grow on them let alone corn or soybeans. So after fighting these sandy soils for years trying to farm them we finally made the decision that crp would do a world of good for these fields. Between the added cover for wildlife and the soil building that comes along with grass it was a no brainer.

We borrowed two old 12ft gravity fed fertilizer spreaders to plant our seed in early march. The nature conservancy is big in Northern Illinois and they do an excellant job of helping local land owners who are trying to re-establish native habitat. The old gravity fed fertilizer spreaders really work well seeding native grasses. As most of you know some of these fluffy seeds are not the easiest to get seeded with convential seeders. These old fertilzer spreaders work great and to top it off you can just pull them behind a truck or even a larger atv. I was worried that we waited too long to get our seed frost seeded but because of all the snow the earliest we could get the seed down was the beginning of march. March ended up being a great month as far as the freezing and thawing action we saw. It even continued into april and I felt really good about "waking" our seed up.

One of the head habitat specialists at the Nature Conservancy really offered us a lot of advice on our project. We thought because of the poor quality of soils we would be planting into that we might have a problem getting a good established native grass field. He actually said we would see just the opposite results. In his years of habitat restoration he said he always has his best results in the poorest soils. The better the soil and the more weed pressure the field would see. I had my doubts but after seeing the results I would have to say he was right on.

Our fields are looking great if you ask me. I know many people say that the first year often looks less than impressive but I cant say that I haven't ever had that thought. Because of our poor soils we never had a real influx of weeds in the fields in april or may. By early to mid June I could already see that our seed had established its self and it was looking good and even throughout our planting. Of course by early august some weeds pressure is occuring in some of the areas that we did have nice, rich soils. But just like my friend at the conservancy said our worst soils, pure sand, are the areas that are looking the best. Almost no weed pressure and the natives have taken off. Without the competion from the weeds for the sun and moisture these "sandy" areas are looking the best. Here is a picture from one part of our field that we call the sand box. It literally has sand in this area like you would see in a sand box and hasnt had a weed or corn stalk grow in it for several seasons. It sure didnt stop these natives

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As you can see in the background this is sand. Its almost pure white in some areas. We did have some areas get washed out with some of those big early season rains we had but I would guess in a year or two the whole field will fill in. This area hardly has a weed in it. The natives are not as tall as I thought they would be by now but they are really looking healthy and full considering the hot, dry conditions we had in july. Here's another picture of a different part of the field where the soils are much better.

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The grass is much taller in this area but so are the weeds. I am not sure if you can see it or not but I planted two different mixes in this field. One was a shorter grass mix and the other was more of a tall grass prairie mix and you can see the line in the field where one mix ends and the other one starts. Pretty cool that you can see the difference this early into the establishment. We must have had some type of wild sunflower in our mix because there is plenty of it out there growing next to our bean plot. We enrolled just over 5 acres into food plots with our signup and here is a picture of one of our plots.

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This plot is two strips of soybeans with sorghum right down the middle. The beans are looking decent but have had significant deer pressure. We had the same problem last year but by the end of August our beans were waist high. Were hoping the same thing happens this year. The sorghum looks real good also. Plenty of weeds in the sorghum because it wasnt roundup ready but I think it adds some nice cover in the plot. Plenty of doves came busting out of the field when we mowed our firebreaks.

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Again you can see plenty of weeds in this picture but again this is an area with some of our better soils. We decided not to use any herbicides so we knew weeds would show up. We did mow once in early july and its seemed to help. I really think some weeds are a good thing and with some timely fires in the future I think this 50 acre field will turn into some great habitat. These firebreaks are nearly 14 ft wide. Hopefully they do there job at stopping futures fires from hoping the fence.

Anyways, I thought I would share all that we have accomplished thanks to the help of DblTree and everyone else who has contributed to this thread over the years. What a great resource we have right here free of charge. Thanks guys
 
Nice post Droptine, I hadn't considered the notion of the poorer soils actually leading to a better 1st year stand of NWSG, but it makes sense if you think about it.
 
A great NWSG for moist areas is prairie cord grass. This stuff will grow in places where water stands for weeks, and also upland soils.

This was scatter seeded 2-3 years ago in the fall on a prepped bed and I went off and forgot about it, thought nothing took, well this year I will have seeds to collect off my own farm!! It stands up very well in winter too.

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Step by Step

Paul,

I was hoping to have you possibly lay out what you would consider to be a step by step approach for preparing for a spring 2012 frost seeding of NWSG's.

I have a new enrollment and have never established the grass your way. I am very interested in trying your approach. So... Where should we be in terms of prep now? And what are the steps we need to take between now and March to insure our best chance of success.

If there is already a thread with a synopsis of this info please redirect me.

Thanks in advance!
 
I was hoping to have you possibly lay out what you would consider to be a step by step approach for preparing for a spring 2012 frost seeding of NWSG's.
Perfect time to go over the steps!
1) Mow existing sod (if in soybeans or corn...do nothing until step 3)

2) Allow re-growth to occur 1-2 weeks) and spray with 2 quarts of glyphosate and 1 quart of crop oil (CO is optional but I feel it gives me a better kill)

3) Broadcast or no-til drill seed anytime from early December thru early March

4) In early to mid April, spray again with 1 quart gly and 6-10 ounces of Panoramic (Plateau)

5) Monitor weed control because at lower rates on heavy soils a second application of 4-6 ounces of Panoramic may be needed after NWSG has 5 leaves. Clipping 12" high or higher to clip off broadleaves will also work equally as well.
Foxtail is the biggest problem and panoramic is pretty good at controlling it but I have to use 12-14 ounces per acre to control tough broadleaves like pigweed. Rarely do the broadleaves really compete with the NWSG however so not to worry if a few come up late in the summer.

On pure switchgrass or big bluestem seedings I use 1/2- 1 ounce of Oust with the initial fall spraying but Oust is very potent and can have a negative effect on other forbs and grasses in a NWSG mix.
 
Paul,

Much appreciated. I will try to document the process and include it on the forums.


Thanks again!
 
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