July 19, 2008 - Wetland Success
We started an experiment a few years ago. There was this awful mudhole in the pasture that seemed to get bigger by the day - when the grass was soggy, the cows would keep breaking hunks of sod off, enlarging the mud area.
This is what it looked like in the spring of 2005. Martin can’t float his boat. I got the idea for fencing this area off from the summer camp I worked at in northern Minnesota. Naturalist and nature photographer Les Blacklock suggested that an area near the center of camp be fenced off from regular foot traffic and be called the “exclosure.” The idea was that a different group of plants might grow up just by leaving it alone. As no part of the farm is left undisturbed, I thought this small section could be spared.
So this mudhole was fenced off, I ordered some marsh and wet (mesic) prairie seeds from Ion Exchange and waited. The area is hard to manage as it gets runoff from the surrounding crop fields and a few times a year water rushed through like a small rapid stream, but most of the time it is dry or muddy. I thought if I could establish a canopy of marsh plants, the water might stick around longer in the shade of the plants.
Here’s a peek at one of the plants to pioneer along the edge of the mudhole - Prairie Cordgrass. It’s been a wet year (5 more inches of rain this week) and the exclosure has had continuous water since snowmelt.
Butterfly milkweed has also been successful in addition to many other plants. It is full of tadpoles, different kinds of dragonflies and butterflies, and many other things I’m sure I don’t see.
