PEORIA HEIGHTS, Ill. — Have you always wanted to create your own small prairie habitat to attract pollinators and wildlife?

 

With the vanishing habitat of the monarch butterfly in the news, many urban and rural dwellers – including farm families – are looking to do just that, according to University of Illinois extension horticulture educator Alicia Gardner.

She recommends starting your prairie habitat from seed, rather than plugs or potted plants that provide quicker blooms but are much more expensive and labor-intensive

than broadcasting seed. Prairie beds should be sown in the fall. Summer should be used for site preparation, including the important but laborious step of removing established vegetation.

“During the summer before planting, you will need to kill out the current vegetation. Depending on the size of the site, a combination of tillage, herbicide application and solarization are used to kill at least two flushes of weeds,” Gardner wrote in an August 9 essay, “Fall Establishment of Prairie Habitat,” published by the U of I College of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACES).

Following seedbed preparation, she recommends broadcasting a seed mix and rolling the area with a lawn roller in the late fall. During the first two growing seasons after planting, mow the site at 8-10 inches high and maintain weeds. By the third season, prairie species should begin to fully emerge.

“At this stage you will enter into a longterm management rotation,” Gardner said. “Some of the management strategies include mowing, prescribed burning and grazing. You should never apply management to the entire plot in a single year; this allows the insects and other wildlife to take refuge in the unmanaged portion of the plot and repopulate the area after management.”

But what seed varieties should you plant in your small or large-sized prairie habitat? For the answer, one should look to local sources such as county extension and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offices, area horticulture businesses and other experts like Kristi Shoemaker, chief naturalist for Forest Park Nature Center in Peoria Heights.

Shoemaker and the small but dedicated staff at the Peoria Park District facility maintain prairie habitat areas along Forest Park’s trail system, and have also established a small “monarch way station” prairie habitat outside the A-framed nature center headquarters.

The way station is home to plants including tall coreopsis, bee’s balm, golden rod, big bluestem, common milkweed, yellow coneflower, prairie grass and more. The pollinator pocket serves as its own independent ecosystem by supporting a diversity of insect and animal life – including, of course, monarch butterflies.

“When you are building a prairie you want to get a good mix of forbs, which are your wildflowers, and grasses. A prairie with all grasses is not as beneficial to pollinators, so the more species you can get, the better,” explained Shoemaker, who studied forestry at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale before going to work for the park district six years ago.

“You want to pick your seed sources from points of origin within 200 miles of your location. You want to go local.” 

 

Picking forbs and grasses should start with a thorough analysis of your seedbed.

“Do you have a wet site, or an upland or hilly site? That will help you narrow down what species are appropriate for your location.

If you have an area with busted drain tiles, or if the area is kind of marshy anyway, you want to pick species that can handle moisture like swamp milkweed, cord grass, spider wort and a number of other species,” she said.

“An upland situation would require another set of species. With a hill prairie you  might look at hoary puccoon (an orangeand yellow flower), purple coneflower and big bluestem. Prairie grasses can go either way, can tolerate more moisture and more sun.”

Common and Sullivan’s milkweed are easily adaptable to most growing conditions (just ask old-school farmers who have battled milkweed root systems encroaching their fence lines!) and can grow in many locations, Shoemaker added. The removal of milkweed plants by farmers and others, of course, has been identified as the primary culprit behind the recent reduction in the North American monarch population.

 

Though seed mixes sold by retailers may be appropriate for many prairie environments, Shoemaker prefers hand-selection of seed for best results.

“If you are involved in a CRP (NRCS Conservation Reserve Program) they often have a specific mix of seed for you to use. But I suggest you try to get as local as possible with your seed selection, and then you can mix the seed together yourself,” she said. “If you want it to go a little further, you can mix things like oats in there, annuals that will die off and give you a little bit of cover.”

The Peoria Park District will be hosting a native plant sale that will include milkweed and other prairie habitat plants adoptable to central Illinois growing conditions on August 26 at Tawny Oaks nature reserve in rural Peoria County. Native plants will be provided by Pleasant Prairie Nursery.

Visit http://web.extension.illinois.edu/cfiv/pollinators to learn more about how to establish small “Pollinator Pocket” gardens.