‘I saw how a yard could be.’ Town of Eagle couple turned acres of farm fields into 3 prairies
When Jean and Tom Weedman look out onto their land, they see prairie plants that look like a sea of color blowing in the wind.
There is butterfly weed with its brilliant orange flowers that attract monarch butterflies, wild columbine, which has red and yellow flowers that hummingbirds and bees love, and little bluestem, a shorter grass that turns bronze in fall and winter and provides seeds for birds and cover for small animals.
These are just some of the stunning plants in the prairies they planted and tend on their 5-acre property in the Town of Eagle
It’s a labor of love and a shared passion to promote native plants and to provide habitat, food, water and shelter for local wildlife.
“This is the stuff that supports pollinators,” Jean Weedman said. “A lot of our insects need certain plants to survive through the generations. Monarchs, of course, need milkweed, and fritillary butterflies need violets. Lightning bugs spend two to three years underground. So, if you are using poisons, you are killing all the larva for lightning bugs. Then people say, ‘I never see lightning bugs anymore!”
This year, their prairie will be one of four naturally landscaped yards on a Wild Ones tour July 9.
Their glacially formed land, which they bought in 1992, was originally a farm field.
They built their house on the property in 1994 and 1995 and started clearing the land in 1996. By 2000, they were ready to plant their first of three prairies at five-year intervals. They also began cleaning out a woodland edge that adjoins their prairies.
She became interested in native plants in the late 1980s, when she and her husband were living on Milwaukee’s east side and she took a tour of native gardens put on by the Schlitz Audubon Center and Wild Ones, the native-plant group.
On the tour were the gardens of Lorrie Otto, the late environmentalist credited with helping to start the first Wild Ones group here in 1977. There are now more than 72 chapters in the U.S. and 23 “seedlings,” which are groups working toward full chapter status.
“We toured Lorrie’s yard in Bayside, and it was filled with native plants. She was leading the tour, and she encouraged everyone to do a landscape that would offer some services to the environment.
“It was like this light-bulb moment for me. I saw how a yard could be,” she said.
Prairies require patience
She began to research native plant and prairie gardens and filled her yard with native plants. But her yard was very small.
Years later, after she and her husband retired from teaching jobs in Oak Creek and Greendale, it was the perfect time to find a home with more land and create the garden she had been dreaming of.
But planting a prairie didn’t happen quickly.
“It took us two years to get the land ready. You have to get rid of the weeds and the weed seeds that are currently there. … You have to do that in two seasons.”
They used chemicals. “Because you have to get rid of the weed seeds, there are few options. If you have a small garden you can smother the weeds and seeds by covering the area with black plastic for a year. But if you have a big area, you have to use chemicals that one time. But then you never have to use them again.
“We had a farmer help with it. We had him cut it really low so the seeds didn’t come up and develop.”
Next came the planting.
“We also had the farmer plant the seeds. … After that, you just sit back and wait. You don’t water it, and you don’t fertilize it. You just let it be.”
Patience is important.
“If you start a prairie from seed, you aren’t going to get things you recognize in the first couple of years. You have to wait to see a variety. … It will happen when it’s ready to happen,” which is usually in three to four years, she said.
Unlike other kinds of gardens, prairies don’t ever have to be watered or fertilized because the native plants in them are accustomed to area soil conditions, she said.
But they do need to be burned or cut back every three to five years.
“It stimulates growth. It gets rid of the dead material. A prairie is accustomed to being burned,” she said.
“What we do is rotate the burning and cutting. One year we will burn one prairie, mow down one prairie, and let the other one serve as an insect habitat.”
Prairies differ from native plant gardens but share some similarities, the main one being that only plants native to Wisconsin are used, Weedman said.
“Either kind of garden is beneficial. A prairie by its nature is a little bigger than a native garden. It’s a community of plants that would naturally grow in the open in our area. They are usually in sunny areas. It’s different from a native plant garden because it’s bigger, so it draws in more critters.
Also, native gardens are organized by humans.
“A prairie is random. In a native plant garden, you would try to put colors together, and you would put masses of certain plants in one spot, and then repeat them in another spot. In a prairie, they grow wherever their seeds fall or where they feel comfortable growing,” Weedman said.
In addition to tending their prairies, Weedman and her husband are restoring their woodland edge.
“It has all native trees and bushes. We mostly have red and burr oak. That was one of the draws to this property.
There’s a giant burr oak at the back of the property. Those big oak trees provide food for birds throughout the year because there is larva hiding under the bark.
“But we also have buckthorn. We hired a contractor to clear the buckthorn along the edge. When he was clearing it, he said, ‘Look what we found.’ There were tons of shooting stars, a beautiful woodland edge spring flower” that has purple, pink or white flowers.
She recently talked about their prairie and the Wild Ones tour.
Question: Why did you decide on this piece of property?
Answer: It was a matter of being in the Kettle Moraine area. That was important to us because it’s a natural resource.
Q: How much time do you spend gardening each day?
A: Maybe a couple hours a week. It’s not a chore. We go out and look for invasive plants.
Q: Do you both work in your green spaces?
A: In terms of weeding, that’s both of us. If it’s planting and planning, that’s mostly me.
Q: What is the hardest part of planting a prairie?
A: The waiting. You have to have a lot of patience. The hardest part is waiting to see what comes in. You also have to learn about the plants. You have to know, is that a weed or a native plant? You have to get your resource books and start to learn.
Q: If Lorrie Otto were alive today, would you like to show her your prairies?
A: Yes. And I would make it clear to her that she was part of the inspiration in starting this. She was famous for her part in getting DDT banned as a pesticide. I heard she used to carry dead birds into meetings to show what the chemical did. She got it banned here first and then it was banned in the rest of the country.
Q: How long have you been a member of Wild Ones?
A: I became a lifetime member of the Kettle Moraine chapter in 2011. I was a regular renewing member before that, probably since the early 2000s.
Q: Are native plant groups more popular these days?
A: Yes. It’s really taken off the last couple of years. But in the ’70s when I toured Otto’s garden, how many people were even thinking about doing a natural landscape?
Q: How many pounds of prairie seed did you use on each of your prairies?
A: About 15 pounds for each prairie, depending on the mix. Each prairie is a little over 1 acre. One is a tall-grass prairie with grasses and other plants that can get up to 10 feet tall, another is a short-grass prairie with plants that get 3 to 4 feet tall, and the third is a diverse prairie with plants that reach 3 to 4 feet. There are pathways around and through each of them.
Q: Do you have any non-native plants on your property?
A: Yes. When we first got here I created a big perennial garden at the front and the back of the house. Now I’m transitioning those areas from non-native plants to natives. Anything that is near the house is much more tended like a garden. We also have three fountains by the house and a little courtyard out front with a bluestone patio.
Q: What happens after you burn or cut your prairie? Is it like starting all over again?
A: No. They come up as soon as two weeks later. We burn in early March.
Q: What wildlife do you see regularly?
A:
The lightning bugs, and sandhill