Meadow Restoration Project: The Planting

            Last week we started discussing Doug’s meadow restoration project and how it came about. This week we’ll pick up with the commencement of the project itself and how it has turned out so far. 

            Beginning in September 2013, Doug began preparing for the planting of the meadow that would occur sometime in the winter of 2013 or early spring of 2014. He ran a disc harrow (pictured below) over the area set to become the meadow. A disc harrow is a farm tool that tills soil to prepare it for planting. The harrow accomplished its goal of killing the top layer of grass and exposing the soil. Killing the existing grass made it easier for the meadow to take root. 

The disc harrow 

Beginning to till the soil 

By November preparing the soil was in full swing. To get a scope of how the project looked compared to Marc Pastorek’s design, take a look at Marc’s plan and a Google Earth view of the property. 

             They’re nearly identical. During this process, Doug purchased a tiller to help with churning up the soil and destroying the grass. The disc hallow had trouble chopping up the deeply rooted grass and turning into soil. The biggest hiccup in the project occurred when Doug tore up the drive shaft on the tiller. The shaft pulled off the tiller and kept spinning because it was still attached to the tractor. The clutch flopped around until it separated from and tore the drive shaft. With the tiller out of commission, Doug switched back to the disc. The photo below shows the state of the meadow at the end of November 2013. 

            In early January 2014 with the aid of Marc Pastorek, the planting of the meadow began. Marc brought his special spreader (designed to deal with the thicker seeds found in wild meadow projects) and got to work. 

Marc and his spreader 

In the weeks that followed the meadow began to grow. A May 2014 visit from Marc led to lots of “oh wow,” “this is great” and “we planted that” comments. The following March, Marc returned for the last step in ensuring the growth and viability of the meadow—the burn.  Marc is a prescribed burn specialist and oversaw the entire process. With the Folsom fire department looking on, mostly out of curiosity as they had not seen a burn like this before, the whole three acres burned in about two hours. With the dead grass gone, the ecosystem had the opportunity to bloom again.

The burn 

  Since that burn in March 2015, the meadow has continued to grow and prosper. It has seen the blossoming of native and local plant species rarely found elsewhere. These species were once commonplace in Louisiana, but human habitation and the American obsession with a well kept green lawn have driven them nearly to extinction. This project helps to fuse the environmental preservation of Louisiana’s natural landscape with modern landscaping. It seeks to prove the viability and necessity of shifting away from destructive landscaping strategies in favor of ones that seek to restore the natural environment that flourished in the southern Coastal Plain for thousands of years. For information about these topics see the Meadow Project’s blog, Marc Pastornek’s work, and the Nature Conversancy.