DECEMBER

A strip of dead Eurasian fescue grass and Chinese lespedeza is exposed in Meadowood’s Big Meadow, as our volunteers fold solarization plastic.

December 4: Seven of us went out to Meadowood on Sunday to fold up all of the solarization plastic in the 17-acre “Big Meadow.” Solarization is a weed-control method. It’s pretty simple: during the growing season, you cover up a patch of weeds with heavy plastic. The plastic reduces the amount of water available to the weeds, eliminates light (if the plastic is opaque), and greatly increases the temperature to which the weeds are subjected. (The technique is usually employed only in full light.) Few plants can survive a bout of solarization, as our tests in the Big Meadow have showed. At Meadowood, we were especially interested in whether solarization could help us manage Chinese lespedeza (Lespedeza cuneata), a semi-woody, shrubby invasive alien plant that is a major pest in Meadowood’s fields. Our conclusions thus far: we can definitely kill the top-growth this way, and we can probably kill the roots, but we don’t yet know what effect, if any, solarization has on the seeds embedded in the soil. The biggest limitation of this method is likely to be cost; it’s probably just too expensive and cumbersome to apply on a large scale. (In the Big Meadow, we solarized about 10,000 square feet—enough to get a sense for what would be feasible.) But solarization would likely be helpful for managing smaller infestations—and in dealing with invasives, we need every tool that we can get! As for the Big Meadow, we’re working with our BLM colleagues on a more comprehensive plan for weed control, which we hope to start in late winter.

NOVEMBER

Volunteers plant a variety of native forbs and grasses in Meadowood's Ecological Display Site.

November 6: 32 volunteers joined us this Sunday for a day of varied planting and meadow management. We worked mostly in our four-acre Ecological Display Site, where we installed a selection of native wetland shrubs and herbs in and around the new stormpond. The stormpond was finished just this year; it lies at the base of our River of Grass feature. At the top of the site, we put in a batch of redcedar (Juniperus virginiana)—a native evergreen tree that thrives in dry, sunny locations. Along the River of Grass, we planted various native herbs—goldenrods (Solidago spp.), for example, and wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia). All the plants came from our own Wild Plant Nursery. We also spent some time in the area that Lisa calls the “Dimple Meadow.” This lies near the Ecological Display Site and was once a gravel quarry—hence the “dimple.” It is now mostly covered with native grasses and herbs; it’s small—less than an acre—but it’s probably the best dry meadow at Meadowood. We’re trying to keep it intact so we occasionally cut the sweetgum (Liquidamber styraciflua) that is coming up in it. (Sweetgum is a native tree, and a rapid colonizer.) We also cut the brambles (Rubus spp.) to prevent them from dominating. (They’re native too.) Finally, of course, we do our best to suppress the invasive aliens; on this front, the main problem here is with Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica). Many thanks to our volunteers, who came from Lake Braddock Secondary School, Joyce Kilmer Middle School, the George Mason University chapter of the Delta Chi fraternity, and FaithsAct, a multi-faith movement inspired by the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

SEPTEMBER

At Meadowood, volunteers uproot sweetgum saplings from meadow. Sweetgum is a native tree, and we’re glad to have it in the forest, but we’re trying to stop it from colonizing the property’s meadows.

September 24: A large but unquantified assortment of volunteers from the Church of Latter Day Saints, Sewa International, scout troops, and the Sangha’s usual suspects joined BLM staff and volunteers for several hours this Saturday, at Meadowood. We were celebrating National Public Lands Day, fixing storm damage to Meadowood’s trails, and doing some meadow work. The latter effort focused mostly on removing sweetgum (Liquidamber styraciflua) saplings to prevent one of the property’s fields from reverting to woodland. Everyone seemed to have a great time—and we really got a lot done. What is that saying about many hands? Well, it’s true!

AUGUST

The Hatted Ones, Lisa on left and Shared Earth’s Caroline Gabel on right, have a look at the Thompson Creek floodplain at Meadowood.

August 10: Caroline Gabel, President of the Shared Earth Foundation, spent this Wednesday morning with us at Meadowood, touring our various sites, and discussing assorted restoration conundrums, both local and farther afield. Shared Earth was the Sangha’s earliest institutional supporter and has been instrumental in building our Wild Plant Nursery; Shared Earth has also provided us with much-needed funding to work out better methods of invasives-control at our Native Arboretum project. But Caroline’s involvement with us extends beyond the standard financial concerns. She has put us in touch with several very experienced land managers in the mid-Atlantic—people who could help us with both our forest and meadow work. And she is providing some valuable context for our Tree Bank, by helping Chris “compare notes” with restoration projects in Guatemala and Borneo—projects that Caroline has been working with for many years. We are very grateful for all of her help!

JULY

At Meadwood, Matt sets up a solarization square in the Big Meadow.

July 27: Matt and Chris visited the Big Meadow at Meadowood, to check on our solarization patches there. In the Big Meadow, we are using plastic tarp to suppress Chinese lespedeza (Lespedeza cuneata), our worst invasive alien weed on this site. (See the note for June 17.) Here too, the initial results are encouraging; all of the lespedeza top-growth beneath the plastic is dead. But we don’t know yet whether the plant’s extensive root stock is damaged by this treatment, whether a selection of appropriate native species could colonize the solarized area before the lespedeza returns, or whether the method is cheap enough to be scaled up. We need to figure that out. As a next step, we set up a several of our 10-foot by 10-foot solarization squares here too.

JUNE

At Meadowood, volunteers from Discovery Media install tree tubes around wild oak and hickory seedlings, to protect them from deer browsing.

June 17: Friday was a “Discover Your Impact” Day of Service for Discovery Media employees, and our Meadowood sites were chosen as one of the company’s volunteer service venues. Twenty-two Discovery volunteers took part and we split up to work on three different tasks. Nikki and summer intern Amber Nichols led one group into the forest along Thompson Creek, to set tree shelters around naturally-occurring (not planted) oak and hickory seedlings, so that they will have a better chance of growing above the deer browse line. Chris and Matt led another group into the Big Meadow, to install sheets of plastic tarp over infestations of Chinese lespedeza (Lespedeza cuneata). We’re hoping that this “solarization” will cook the lespedeza, our biggest invasive problem on this site, and loosen its grip. And Lisa, Philip, and long-time volunteer Jerry Schrepple worked with yet another group of Discovery employees in our Horse Barn and Ecological Display sites. The task there was to build and install wire cages around saplings that had outgrown their tree tubes but that were still vulnerable to deer. All three projects went extremely well, and we’re very grateful to our Discovery friends for helping us make so much progress in the course of just a single day!

MAY

Volunteers plant swamphaw and black chokeberry at Meadowood, in the Thompson Creek floodplain.

May 7: On Saturday, 11 volunteers from several local high schools joined us at Meadowood to continue our work in the forest. (See the note for May 1.) We planted swamphaw (Viburnum nudum) black chokeberry (Photinia melanocarpa), and sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), among other native species. As always at our plantings, all the stock came from our own Wild Plant Nursery. Since this was Virgina’s “Invasive Plant Removal Day,” we took the volunteers on a tour of the Thompson Creek floodplain and removed a few manageable patches of Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum), while discussing the local ecology. Then we showed them a monster stiltgrass infestation, which stretches for the better part of a mile along the Creek’s main channel. We left that for another Invasives Removal Day!

At Meadowood, volunteer Jen Cowham plants American elm seedlings in a nice, soggy channel that runs into Thompson Creek.

May 1: On Sunday, we finally took a break from the full sun of our meadow projects and retreated to the shade of the forest at Meadowood. Our group of 20 volunteers was made up mostly of South County Secondary School students and members of Sewa International, a Hindu-inspired nonprofit that promotes volunteerism. Working in the wooded floodplain of Thompson Creek, we installed over 300 seedlings of spicebush (Lindera benzoin), American elm (Ulmus americana), American hazelnut (Corylus americana), flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), southern arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum), and other native shrubs and trees that are either generalist (they grow in a wide range of conditions) or that favor wet soils. This part of Meadowood’s forest is dying back because the water table has risen and the big trees are, in effect, drowning. The rising water table is a consequence of heavier stormwater runoff. We’re trying to help the forest adapt to the new conditions by planting species that are native to this part of the coastal plain and that do well in wet soils. We are also trying to mitigate the effects of intensive deer browsing, which has forced declines in many native tree and shrub species in Meadowood's forests.

APRIL

Lake Braddock environmental science instructor Mark Khosravi with trophy sweetgum stem.

April 10: A group of 36 volunteers, mostly Lake Braddock Secondary School students, along with a small troop of post-high school volunteers, resumed work this Sunday in the Gravel Quarry Meadow at Meadowood, cutting sweetgum trees, bramble, and Japanese honeysuckle. (The sweetgum and bramble are native but we’re trying to prevent them from taking over the meadow.) We also transplanted about 20 redcedar seedlings out of the Gravel Quarry Meadow, where there are lots of them, to the Ecological Display Site, which lies nearby and where we are trying to establish two redcedar groves. Special thanks to Lake Braddock environmental science instructor Mark Khosravi for keeping everyone on task, and for demonstrating the operational limits of brush saws.

Volunteers return to the Big Meadow at Meadowood.

April 9: On this Saturday, we went back out to the Big Meadow at Meadowood for another bout of planting in the meadow’s plowed patches. Our nine volunteers did a great job—another 250 pots of grasses and forbs went in, bringing the total number of plants installed here this spring to 1,100. Our plantings in this site have something of an experimental character. We know more or less what species of plants ought to occur here, and we’re growing most of those species at our Wild Plant Nursery. What we don’t know is how hard it will be to establish them amidst the dense, exotic Eurasian fescue grass that dominates most of this site. Our best guess at present: we’ll lose some species completely but succeed with a few. If that happens, then we’ll look for ways to extend the reach of the successful few, and reintroduce the rest in areas where our successes have suppressed most of the fescue. It’s a process!

Air Force volunteers plant one of our restoration patches in the Big Meadow at Meadowood.

April 2: A group of 30 volunteers, most of them from the Air Force, helped us get our main meadow planting at Meadowood off to a great start this Saturday morning. We went to work on a 17-acre site that we have named, rather hopefully, the “Big Meadow.” It’s already big, of course, but it’s almost entirely covered with exotic fescue grasses, which pretty much disqualifies it, at present, for meadow status. Our volunteers began to change that, by putting in a variety of native grasses and forbs. (Forbs are herbaceous plants that aren’t grasses.) All of these plants were grown from local, wild seed at our Wild Plant Nursery. The plantings went into a set of patches where the fescue had been plowed up. The idea is to try to establish native plant communities in these patches and then expand them. This is likely to be a long and difficult process. But then that’s true of most beneficial change!

MARCH

Philip and Lisa sow local-ecotype little bluestem, a native grass, along the eroding slopes of the "dimple meadow" at Meadowood.

March 24: Lisa, Philip, and Nikki spent an afternoon planting around the stormwater catchment pond on our Ecological Display Site at Meadowood. The pond's excavation and the drainage system are now complete, so it's safe to begin planting the banks. Some native grasses, as well as chokeberry (a native shrub), now line the border between the pond and the gravel path that leads into the site. They also returned to the "dimple meadow" (see the note for March 13) to sow native grass seed in some eroding areas.

At Meadowood, volunteers preserve native meadow by controlling a sweetgum stand.

March 13: This Sunday morning, 22 volunteers came out to Meadowood, to help control a stand of sweetgum trees in a little meadow where some very beautiful and interesting native grass species are growing. Lisa calls this place the “dimple meadow”—because it’s a relatively small depression with an open, flat bottom, and maybe also because “dimple” sounds more interesting than “bowl.” The place was once a gravel pit—many years ago. Its groundlayer is now dominated by broomsedge, purple lovegrass, and various other native grasses. One of its slopes is home to a large native bee colony. It is, in short, very much what a little eastern meadow ought to be. But it won’t stay that way if we don’t control the sweetgum, a fast-growing native tree that sprouts readily from both seed and established roots. Sweetgum is great—but here we’ve got a little too much of a good thing! The site also has lots of Virginia pine, which we are leaving in place for now, since the pine won’t shade out the grasses.

FEBRUARY

Lisa, from afar, sows wild-collected native grass seed at the base of our River of Grass at Meadowood.

February 24: We started work on another little patch of meadow at Meadowood! Lisa and Nikki sowed over 12 pounds of seed from seven native grass species around the recently constructed stormwater catchment pond in our Ecological Display Site. This area will eventually become a small, wet meadow—a kind of complement to the bigger and largely upland meadow plots we delineated yesterday. Jinx Fox of the BLM came out to help spread straw over the seeds for protection. All of the seed was collected from local meadows and carefully processed by the Sangha and dozens of very patient volunteers. The pond area itself had been sculpted into the landscape by the BLM, in collaboration with the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District; it forms the base of our site’s “River of Grass” drainage feature. Even though the area was muddy and slippery, there was a warm breeze in the air. Nikki reports that she and Lisa had a blast!

At Meadowood, Lisa Bright (at left) and Jinx Fox look at a section of field that we plan to restore to native meadow beginning this spring. The project will create more habitat for many native plant and animal species, some of them uncommon in our area.

February 23: Lisa, Chris, and BLM officials Jinx Fox, Jeff McCusker, and their colleagues began flagging meadow-restoration plots in a 17-acre field at Meadowood. This field is one of the areas that we will start restoring to native meadow this spring, as part of a project funded in part by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. In the photo, Lisa (at left) and Jinx look out over the area we’re flagging. It looks so, well, blank—doesn’t it? It’s not. Despite the tabula rasa appearance, this area is in the grip of tough Eurasion fescue grasses, introduced for grazing, as well as various other invasive alien plants that aren’t visible at present because the field has been mowed. Coaxing a native meadow back out on to this site is going to be an enormous challenge. If you live in the DC area, we could really use your help. Please consider volunteering!

JANUARY

Arlington County Master Naturalist Gary Putnam and colleague employ the “Putnam Thresher” in the interest of meadow restoration. Patent not yet pending.

January 31: This Monday, as on every recent Monday, the Arlington Master Naturalists have been hard at it, cleaning grass seed for our Wild Plant Nursery. We’ll use the seed to grow plants for our large meadow restoration projects at Meadowood and the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge. For some of our grass species, separating the seed from the stems involves a great deal of work, so Gary Putnam, one of our Arlington colleagues, devised a simple threshing apparatus. It consists of an upside-down grocery delivery tray, some bungee cords for securing the grass to the bottom of the tray, a covering, and whatever the operator chooses to use as a flail. Take a look!

Look how well Gary's invention works! That's a lot of seed.

January 31, just a few minutes later: Gary's contraption could really be a big help, as you can see from this photo. There are two native grass species of great importance to our meadow projects—broomsedge and little bluestem—and that are tediously difficult to process. We have sacks upon sacks of this stuff. It looks like "low tech" could be the answer!

Arlington Regional Master Naturalists clean grass seed for our meadow restoration efforts.

January 24: About 20 volunteers took over the conference room of Arlington County’s Long Branch Nature Center to clean native-grass seed for our Wild Plant Nursery. This is a very labor-intensive process—there is no threshing machine available for these species!—and if we had to pay for this kind of help, we would probably be bankrupt. Propagating these grasses is a big priority for us this year, because of our expanding meadow-restoration efforts, especially those at Meadowood and Occoquan Bay. We are very grateful to Arlington Regional Master Naturalists for organizing this event!

Volunteers at work in one of Meadowood’s meadows last October. This is one of the areas covered in our new NFWF grant.

Also January 24: We are pleased to announce that the Earth Sangha has been awarded a $25,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The grant will help us create a meadow restoration program at the Meadowood Recreation Area, and launch a public on-line map and database of Meadowood’s native flora.

Meadowood is an 800-acre property located on the Mason Neck Peninsula, in southern Fairfax County, Virginia, and managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management. We have been working there since 2008 on three forest restoration projects. This new grant will allow us to begin a major initiative on the property’s ungrazed fields. (About 600 acres of Meadowood are forested; most of the rest are ungrazed field.) All that space means that Meadowood has considerable potential for meadow restoration. Such restoration is important to local conservation because meadows are among our most species-diverse plant communities, and because relatively few large, good-condition meadows remain in our region. Much of our meadow effort will involve the control of invasive alien plants, and the reestablishment of appropriate native meadow plants.

The on-line map will allow both professional and amateur naturalists to view and plot native plants occurrences on an accurate, local scale. The resource will be launched for Meadowood, then extended to other plant communities in the region. Over the long term, the map should make it easier to track the ecological effects of various important environmental stresses, such as climate change, the spread of invasive alien species, and habitat fragmentation.

The grant was awarded to us under the Native Plant Conservation Initiative. The grant requires us to make a minimum match (from sources other than the federal government) of at least $84,164. Most of our match will be in the form of volunteer hours—and we hope that some of your hours will be among them. This is an ambitious project, and we’re really going to need your help!

Volunteers crowd into Meadowood’s offices to clean copious amounts of native grass seed, to help restore Meadowood’s meadows.

January 9: About 35 volunteers, mostly students from Lake Braddock and Fairfax High Schools, spent this Sunday morning at Meadowood, cleaning seed of two important native-grass species (little bluestem and deer tongue). Meadowood’s BLM staff generously allowed us to use one of their “office houses” for our seed operation, since it was far too cold to work outdoors. Volunteers packed the place—but even so, it was a quiet and focused activity. Cleaning grass seed is not easy. For the little bluestem especially, you have to tease all the fluffy seeds out of each stem, one stem at a time. And if you’re not careful, the feather-like seeds tend to float away, thanks to their amazing wind-dispersal adaptations. Capturing them in a bag required a lot of attention! Lisa said that “after three hours, the cleaned seeds could make one nice pillow. Now, we only have to make 50 more pillows!” (Lisa’s idea of a joke.) In April, we will sow all these seeds in thousands of little pots, and once they’re sprouted, we’ll transplant them into the meadows of Meadowood!