Tag Archives: herbicide

Sunflowers!

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The emotional response you have to this photo will say a lot about your background, experience, and cultural influences.

A profusion of sunflowers in sandhill prairie at The Nature Conservancy's Niobrara Valley Preserve in north central Nebraska.

A profusion of annual sunflowers (Helianthus petiolaris) in sandhill prairie at The Nature Conservancy’s Niobrara Valley Preserve in north central Nebraska.

The sandhills of Nebraska consist of nearly 20,000 square miles of prairie.  The scale can be hard to comprehend until you have driven through it for hour after hour, gaping at the beauty spreading out all around you.  When I drove through a good portion of the eastern sandhills this week, a lot of it looked like this photo – covered with blooming yellow sunflowers.

Many readers of this post will be thinking, “Wow!  What a beautiful year in the sandhills!”  But I know others of you are thinking, “Ugh, what do we have to do to get rid of these invasive weeds?”

I’m going to get to that discrepancy, but let’s first back up and look at why the sunflowers are so abundant this year.  First, the sunflower species we’re talking about here is an annual called plains sunflower (Helianthus petiolaris).  It germinates from seed in the spring, flowers in the summer, and dies at the end of the same year.

During the drought of 2012, annual sunflowers were among the few plant species able to continue growing and flowering during the hot dry summer.  Because of that, sunflowers were able to produce copious amounts of seed, many of which ended up on the ground at the end of the year.  Few other grassland plants produced anything comparable to the seed crop of those sunflowers.

The spring of 2013 brought abundant rain to the dry sandhills.  In addition, the plant litter from last year’s dry growing season was thin and sparse, allowing a lot of light to hit the soil. That combination of abundant light and moisture was exactly what all those plains sunflower seeds needed, and they germinated.

Of course, germination doesn’t ensure survival, and many annual plants germinate each year, only to be quickly overshadowed and outcompeted by strong perennial plants.  Perennials have the advantage of a pre-existing root system that can monopolize moisture and nutrients from the soil while annuals are still struggling to get started.  In years when perennial grasses and wildflowers are strong, there is very little space for annuals to grow, except in places where the soil and plant community were disturbed by digging animals or intensive grazing/trampling.

However, in the spring of 2013, not only were conditions perfect for plains sunflower germination, competing perennial plants were also weak from drought and grazing in 2012, leaving lots of open space belowground for sunflower roots to take advantage of.  In short, you couldn’t have designed a better situation for the sunflower.  It was one of the few plant species to produce seed in 2012, and then it got light, moisture, and weak competition in 2013.  It’s no wonder the hills are yellow!

Some people will look at this photo and see an amazing abundance of pretty wildflowers. Others will see weeds running amuck.

Some people will look at this photo and see an amazing abundance of pretty wildflowers. Others will see weeds running amuck.  At the Niobrara Valley Preserve, last year’s wildfire increased the favorable conditions for plains sunflower by creating massive amounts of bare ground for germination.  While it looks like a monoculture from a distance, hidden among the sunflowers are lots of grasses and other plants that are slowly regaining their vigor.  By next season, this will be a very different looking prairie.

Ok, back to the perception issue.  Sunflowers are one of the most popular and well-known flowers in the world.  They are big, attractive, and easy to recognize.  On the other hand, many farmers and ranchers have grown up learning that sunflowers (of any kind) are weeds.  The presence of sunflowers in a field or pasture – especially an abundance of them – can be seen as a badge of shame for the landowner who is clearly not managing his/her weed problems adequately.

The important thing to remember if you’re a rancher, however, is that the sunflowers are not outcompeting perennial grasses.  Instead, the sunflowers are opportunists, taking advantage of the fact that grasses are weak.  As perennial grasses recover from last year’s drought and/or grazing, they will reclaim the root space they lost in 2012 and sunflowers will have much less room to grow next year.  Plains sunflower is a native prairie plant, and it’s role is to fill the space left when other plants are weakened (similar to ragweeds and other opportunistic species).  If sunflower wasn’t filling that space, another “weedy” species would, and the alternative could be much worse.

Some ranchers will be tempted to spray their pastures to kill off the “invading” sunflowers, but that’s actually a counterproductive strategy.  First, the annual sunflowers are going to die at the end of the season anyway, so if you want fewer sunflowers next year, the best strategy is to focus on limiting the germination and growth of next year’s crop by allowing perennial grasses and wildflowers to regain their dominance.  Second, herbicide spraying will kill a number of other plant species that are both valuable as forage and competitors with sunflowers and other annuals.  Why spend money to weaken the long-term viability of your grassland?

It’s also important to remember that cattle do eat sunflowers – they particularly like them early in the season when the leaves and stems are tender, but will also seek out the nutritious buds and flowers later in the season.  The evidence of that can be seen right now; pastures grazed at certain times this year have many fewer blooming sunflowers than those that haven’t yet been grazed this season.  In addition, of course, sunflowers are among the most valuable grassland plants in a prairie for wildlife and pollinators.  They produce large nutritious seeds for birds and other wildlife, and have abundant and accessible supplies of nectar and pollen that attract numerous pollinator species.  In short, sunflowers may not be everyone’s favorite plant, but they’re far from a useless weed or invasive threat.

For those of you who started out reading this post as fans of sunflowers, good for you!  If you get the chance, you should take a drive through Nebraska’s sandhills this summer and enjoy the scenery – it’s not likely that we’ll see another year like this for a while.  For those who are appalled by the abundance of sunflowers this year, maybe you can take some comfort from the fact that it’s a temporary phenomenon, and one tied to a particular combination of weather factors more than anything you or others did as land managers.  Things will be different next year.

Regardless of whether or not you like sunflowers, I guess there’s one thing we can all agree on.  The year 2013 will be one to remember!

Note:  Nebraska has nine species of native sunflowers, seven of which are perennials.  All of them are valuable for wildlife and pollinators, and important components of a healthy grassland community.

Blowing Against the Wind?

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As I mentioned last week, I recently spent a couple days helping our land manager, Nelson Winkel, pull garlic mustard at our Rulo Bluffs Preserve in southeast Nebraska.  The invasive species has just started to invade our property within the last several years.  We’ve heard stories from colleagues in other places about beautiful woodland plant communities turning into monocultures of garlic mustard within a relatively short time period.  We’d sure like to keep that from happening at our Preserve.

So, we pulled garlic mustard plants.  A lot of them.  On the first day, I figured we pulled at least 25,000 plants.  That’s a very conservative estimate.  The second day was longer, but we did more searching and less pulling.  This wasn’t the first trip to pull either, so we were just trying to get what was leftover from the previous efforts.

Nelson Winkel, showing off one patch's worth of pulled garlic mustard plants. The Nature Conservancy's Rulo Bluffs Preserve - Nebraska.

Nelson Winkel, showing off one patch’s worth of pulled garlic mustard plants. The Nature Conservancy’s Rulo Bluffs Preserve – Nebraska.

The Rulo Bluffs Preserve is 444 acres.  Hand-pulling weeds doesn’t seem like a very sustainable strategy for invasive species control at that scale.  In fact, it’s downright depressing because we pull more plants from more locations every year.  We’re clearly not winning.  So why bother?

It’s a good question, with several answers.  The first answer is that we’ve got some ideas for increasing our effectiveness.  Nelson and I talked as we worked about how we might put together a small army of volunteers to come help us pull each spring.  The big challenges are that the site is far from population centers (more than two hours from Lincoln and Omaha), has difficult terrain to hike in, and garlic mustard doesn’t bloom at exactly the same time each year, so we’d have to schedule work days on fairly short notice.  On the other hand, I think there are people who’d be glad to help, and it is a beautiful place to work in the spring time – lots of warblers and other birds above, and plenty of woodland wildflowers below.

In addition to finding more people to help hand pull, we hope to decrease the number of plants we need to pull in the bigger, more established, patches by doing some herbicide work in the late winter.  Garlic mustard is a winter annual or biennial which germinates in one season, overwinters as a rosette (a few leaves, low to the ground), and then flowers in the late spring of the next year.  Our colleagues in more eastern states have been dealing with garlic mustard longer than we have, and have had luck spraying the rosettes with Glyphosate herbicide on warm February days.  Spraying in the winter works well because there are very few other woodland plants that are green (and thus susceptible to Glyphosate) in February.  They don’t usually spray in the early winter because many rosettes die on their own over the winter, and by waiting until February, they can focus only on those most likely to bloom in the coming year.  Nelson was marking the bigger patches we found with a GPS unit so he can find them next winter and try the spraying technique.

Small patches of garlic mustard such as this one might eventually be eliminated by hand-pulling.

Small patches of garlic mustard such as this one might eventually be eliminated by hand-pulling – especially if we find and treat them every year.  Larger patches are much more problematic.

The second reason we’re still trying to suppress garlic mustard is that I hope we can buy some time until better control options become available.  There has been some work to develop a biocontrol technique (using insects from the native range of garlic mustard), for example, and if something like that turns out to be effective, I want to be sure we still have some woodland left to save.  Unfortunately, I’m hearing that biocontrol development has stalled at the moment.  Apparently, in at least some places, people are seeing garlic mustard populations decline steeply on their own – as if the plants are outcompeting themselves and self-thinning.  That could be great news, but only if the native plant community rebounds as the garlic mustard declines, and I haven’t been able to find anyone who can tell me whether or not that’s the case.  I sure hope it is, but I’d feel better if the biocontrol folks kept forging ahead on the development of that control option anyway.  Regardless, I’m holding out hope that either garlic mustard will turn out to be a temporary nuisance (seems unlikely?) or that biocontrol or better control options will be developed in the next several years.  I could be naive, but at least it gives us something positive to think about while we’re pulling up thousands of garlic mustard plants…

While we look for better control options, we’re also trying to change the playing field for plant competition at Rulo Bluffs and give garlic mustard less of an advantage.  With considerable help from Kent Pfeiffer of Northern Prairies Land Trust, and funding from the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and others, we’ve been trying to ramp up our stewardship work during the last several years.  We’ve not done as much burning as we’d like to, but are earnestly trying to change that.  Last fall, a contractor did some “hack-and-squirt” herbicide treatment to kill many of the smaller understory trees that are shading out the herbaceous plants on the ground.  We’ve also been doing mechanical shredding of brush on ridgetops to help the grassland, savanna, and open woodland plants there.  All of this work is aimed at getting more light to the ground, which should stimulate increased oak regneration and a stronger, more diverse, herbaceous community on the woodland floor.  In addition, we hope that increased light will put shade-loving garlic mustard at a disadvantage, at least in some parts of the woodland.  From talking with others around the country, they’ve seen mixed results from similar work.  I guess since we want that light on the ground anyway, we’re going to forge ahead – and hope we don’t make things worse.

Jack-in-the-pulpit is one of many woodland flower species that help make the Rulo Bluffs Preserve unique and valuable.

Jack-in-the-pulpit is one of many woodland flower species that help make the Rulo Bluffs Preserve unique and valuable.

Finally, we’re pulling garlic mustard because the Rulo Bluffs Preserve is worth the effort.  It’s one of the few remaining high-quality oak woodlands in Nebraska, and hosts a wide diversity of plant and animal species – many living at the edge of their geographic range.  In addition to lots of mayapples, jack-in-the-pulpit plants, and woodland phlox, we also found two orchid species blooming last week – the showy orchid and the yellow lady’s slipper orchid.  We walked around beneath eastern deciduous tree species such as chinkapin oak, black oak, and Ohio buckeye.  Several animal species at the preserve, including zebra swallowtails, timber rattlesnakes, and southern flying squirrels, are only found on the very eastern edge of Nebraska.  While some of those species are common to the east of us, it is probably important to protect their genetic diversity by maintaining populations across their entire range.  That should allow the species to better adapt and survive in changing conditions over time.

Genetic and biological diversity aside, the Rulo Bluffs Preserve is also important because it’s a beautiful place.  We need to keep some aesthetically-pleasing natural areas around for people to enjoy.  Despite our aching backs, Nelson and I had a great time exploring the preserve last week, marveling at warblers, flowers, velvet mites, and other wonders.  It’s possible that we’ll invest a tremendous amount of time and money into stewardship and restoration at the Rulo Bluffs Preserve over the next several years and still lose out to garlic mustard.  There are plenty of examples of that happening elsewhere.  I guess we’re not ready to concede the battle, however – there’s too much at stake.