The prairie flowers are in full bloom right now. We have about two acres of these purple, yellow and white beauties. The warm season grasses including big bluestem, little bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass are pushing their way up through the midst of the flowers at this point in the summer, too. In a few weeks the grasses will dominate, giving a beautiful fall show of color and texture. These plants all have deep, deep roots (sometimes 8-16 feet deep) that allow the rain to penetrate the soil to replenish the aquifers. This is in contrast to the 1/4" roots of our typical lawn grasses like Kentucky bluegrass. On the lawn, a heavy rain will simply run off into ditches. On prairie, it soaks right in.
This thick growth of the prairie grasses and flowers is the vegetation that made the incredibly rich soil here in the Midwest as it grew and decayed year after year, century after century, occasionally being burned off when lightning ignited dry grasses. The burning returned many of the minerals to the soil and made them available to new growth and the thick layers of decay added rich, rich organic matter to the soil. Here on the farm we have only a few of the wide variety of plants that once grew around here but even those few put on quite a show at this time of year. Some people look at the untidy-ness of such fields and simply see a huge patch of weeds. I look at it and see habitat for birds, insects, butterflies and small mammals, a rich source of seed to feed the birds through the long hard winter, nectar and pollen for my honeybees, and a reminder of what this area looked like 200 years ago, before it was populated. It's a tiny patch of history, right in our backyard and it's alive with all kinds of critters.
