The Practical Prairie
Welcome. It’s fortunate you’ve chosen the path that’s led you here…..
I’m Wayne Oliver, and I’d like to welcome you to “THE Practical Prairie”, a journal I’m writing to document the creation of River Bend Gardens. The design of the gardens will be a blend of preservation, restoration, and recreation of natural communities with native plants. While I’m happy to share the lessons learned from restoring hay fields to tallgrass, my primary aspiration for this journal is capturing the spirit of the gardens for my children. John James Audubon said, “a true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children”. I’m the proud father of five, and with the support of my wife Julie, we’re motivated by love for our children and this land to protect a legacy for them….and their children.
For the readers who’ve found themselves on this garden’s path, I hope my writing is as informative as it is interesting regardless if you’re a gardener or naturalist who appreciates the beauty of the effort. If you’re a gardener, I intend on offering a pragmatic approach to recreating a prairie from an agricultural field that will provide valuable insight to planting a bed of natives in the yard.
Dirty Talk!
A gardener’s success or failure is in the soil. Knowing the soil types present on your land will guide what may grow best in your garden, and potentially how to amend your beds.
There are four constituents to soil, Sand, Silt, Clay, and Humus. Sand, Silt, and Clay refer to the size of the inorganic soil particles. Sand is the largest and loosest particle, followed by significantly smaller sediment building Silt, and then the finest tightly compacting Clay particles. Humus is the organic material contained in the soil comprised of plants that have decayed over time. The mix of these inorganic constituents combined with the amount of humus creates what is referred to as loam. All soil types are simply some naturally occurring combination of these components, where the triangle chart to the left places the three soil particles at 100% in the corners and pure humas presented as loam in the center. Moving along the sides of the triangle from one particle to the other changes the mix on a percentage basis, and presents the respective type of soil.
A land owner can take this soil knowledge to the next level and study the specific mixes, which all have their own names, and an amazing resource is provided by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) & Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS). They have built a website with soil surveys of the entire United States, so a gardener is able to research the specific soil types/names present on their property.
https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm
For River Bend Gardens, I employed an application AcreValue, which uses the same NRCS maps.
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