A Prairie’s Path—how burning it helped make it green today
Article from College of DuPage's Courier
It all starts with the flick of a lighter. Moments later a patch of prairie the size of a swimming pool will be reduced to a layer of black ash and soot.
With an abundance of cold windy days in early April, Brian McQuaid, who has been the natural areas manager for six years, was having a difficult time finding a good day to burn the prairie.
“Our prairies are surrounded by roads, buildings, athletic fields and residential areas,” McQuaid said, “It’s important to minimize the negative impacts of the smoke so certain areas are burned only when the wind direction is such that the smoke will be carried away from sensitive areas of the campus.” According to McQuaid in the winter months the plants in the prairie are dormant with their about ground parts having died in
the fall.
A fire in late March or early April clears away the dead stems from the previous year and deposits the nutrients from those stems back into the soil.
Non-native grasses, like the grass on most lawns, sprout up in early spring. The same fire that helps the nature prairie plants grow also kills, or at least damages, non- native plants that had sprouted in the prairie.
“The prairie doesn’t really need to 'recover’ from the fire,” McQuaid said. “The fire allows the normal progression of the growing season to begin a little easier than it would in the absence of controlled burn.”
It will be a few weeks before the prairie begins to grow its native plants. Although the fire prevents them from being a serious problem, some of the first plants to green after the fire are non-native grasses.
By early May the first flowers will begin to bloom, by July the prairie will be in its peak-growing season, by fall it starts all over.
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