Why am I precariously perched atop of Austin?

because we're showing just how adaptable prairies are.

Now we're looking at 800 square feet of grassland perched atop a pool house.

Prairies, as it turns out, are really great at dealing with a lot of challenges that urban issues have.

Rainwater runoff, carbon sequestration, heat island mitigation, habitat.

When we start prairies, we're talking about trajectories, not interventions.

Prairies let us practice what I like to call the art of becoming.

We're smack in downtown Austin at a private residence who decided to make habitat a pivotal point of their landscape design.

What you see behind me is a new pocket prairie.

This property was owned by the same family for a long time.

We're talking about the 1800s.

So we were asked to come in and establish habitat based on that historic climax community.

What does that mean?

Well, all the plants, the grasses, the flowers that would have been here.

when we still had the bison and the wildfires coming through So what you're looking at is a whole bloom from a seeding that we did last October.

Let's talk about some of the steps that we went to make this prairie happen.

We took a year to prepare the site.

There were some invasive species We looked at treating the landscape to get those out of there.

We then treated the soils with compost and biochar.

We're using biochar more and more in our projects because why it would have been in the soil due to the wildfires that would have swept through every 10 to 11 years.

So that has a profound effect on the microbial associations in the soil and we want to promote that.

We then mulch the site with eight inches of mulch for a whole year.

Now, why do we do that?

Well, that's because we want to address warm and cool season grasses and weeds that pop up.

If you just do it for a couple of months, that's great.

If that's all the time you got, that's better.

But if we can do it for a full year,then we're able to address those that we won't get from just a singular season treatment After that year, we pulled all that mulch back off.

We use a no till drill.

What is that?

Well, that's a piece of equipment that allows us to put fluffy grass seed and hard, dense wildflower seed into separate bins.

And And we pull it over the site and deposits that seed at just that right sweet spot depth so that it will be happy and emerge.

We always want to plan to sow those wildflower seeds in October we've got clasping cone flower, we've got plains coreopsis.

We've got monarda citriodora, So bee balm, we've got blue curls that's already flowered this year, but it's getting ready to set some seed.

You also see a lot of drooping.

Well, that's because of this glorious rain we've had this year.

Before all of this was here, we had our little bluestem that we had planted our sedge, but we had a big bluebonnet display.

As we move a little bit later in we're hopefully going to see some Mexican hat.

We're starting to see more of the gaillardia, the blanket flower coming through.

We're also seeing more basketflower really starting to bloom.

It's pretty tall at this point, but that's coming out and we're really anticipating a starting to see more of the grasses.

The grasses are going a lot slower because of the fact that they've got a lot of light competition going on because, again, we've got this explosion in color.

As we move into summer we're going to start to see standing cypress, hopefully some liatris.

Again, this is a brand new prairie,so we'll see what she gives us.

And again, this year, really special wet, mild spring.

So we're going to see a really extended color palette as we go through.

Some years when it's hot and dry.

You might only get a little bit of a burst and then it goes to sleep.

A majority of what we're looking at right now are annuals When we do these prairie plantings, initially, you get this big explosion of annual growth and that's great.

But this prairie was designed so that we have succession that will occur and that will slowly start to morph more towards grass dominance and perennials.

So while all those guys and gals are in here right now, you can't see them.

Prairies are grass dominant systems.

There's a there's a saying that the author, Bill Holm, has written that I really love it says a woodsman can look at a square mile of prairie and only see grass but a prairie person can look at a square foot and see a universe.

And that's what we're after, folks.

The grasses are really a main driver and they can seem kind of maybe boring.

They're not.

They've got flowers, but it doesn't look like the forbs.

But that's okay because they're a pivotal part of the prairies evolution.

Now, we installed over 3000 one-gallon little bluestem plants into this prairie.

Why do we want to plant some of these species like little bluestem or theyre theyre what's known successional species.

So you can have a baby prairie and you can have a mature prairie.

In our mature prairies, we see some of these grasses like little bluestem,big bluestem, Indian grass, switchgrass.

We want to make sure those are in there.

And now we can come to an infant site if you say, and put out 1000 pounds of little bluestem grass, but we're probably not going to have sustained growth.

You might get really good initial germination, but it's going to crash.

Why is that the case?

Well, it's the microbes in the soil.

As we talk about maturity and prairies.

It's not just about what plants are there.

The plants are demonstrating the life that's in the soil.

So to shortcut that process, we know that if we're going to plug a living one-gallon little bluestem say that we're essentially helping inoculate those soils and helping shortcut that restoration process.

Prairies have the same challenge or considerations that just your regular garden would.

Light is a big one.

So as you can see, we've got a lot of mature, live oaks behind us that we love and want to protect But we also want to get that diverse, herbaceous understory grasses and flowers underneath.

So the mix where we saw earlier had some of the same characters because there's some that go between light and shady areas.

We've got other species and right now a little harder to but theres a lot over 700 sedge species, native sedge species that will eventually start to dominate this as these wildflowers recede.

And that's the name of the game with pocket prairies.

It's always about transition, transition, transition.

So let's talk a little bit of tasks with a pocket prairie so you can see there's some florid abundance behind us.

But as these things, some things die and seed out, we will clean that up.

In nature the wildfires and the bison and all the other ungulates would have done that for us.

So unfortunately, we can't get any of those here in downtown Austin.

But what we can do is let these things go to seed and then we can start to dethatch, remove some of that dead organic material.

And that's key because if you don't, you're going to start to lose diversity over time because you're going to essentially mulch yourself out of business.

So we'll let these guys weve got a blue curls right here.

You can see it's starting to go to seed, its got a little bit of flower left, but we'll let this go to seed, let this completely die out because we want that seed to go back in the ground and then maybe late summer or we can even wait till the the winter is when we'll come in and do a really big cut back.

Let's go into a little bit more detail about dethatching.

What do we mean?

It really depends on the scale of the vegetative growth in your garden.

In this case, you can see it's pretty tall.

So what we would want to do is come in and cut it physically and then we would probably pick it up by hand and then move it and store it or compost it or what we want.

If you've got a short grass prairie, well,you might just be kind of mowing and raking and even with a mid-grass prairie with blue grama and side oats grama and stuff like that.

But the main point is to just to get all the stuff out so that the new seeds can sprout see the light of day in the next seasons and then thrive.

This is the wonderful thing that prairies offer us, is this chance to reflect and watch these transitions occur over time.

It is a continual dynamic process that really rewards us.

But ultimately what occurs is up to the prairie