On these cool spring days, it’s easy to forget the approaching hot, humid days in store for Iowans this summer. The Iowa State University Extension and Outreach wildlife program offers the following recommendations for the impending hot summer days: avoid the heat by spending less time on the mower....
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The title to this article is the answer to a question I get often. I suspect the curiosity is spawned from a combination of state law, which mandates roadsides be spared the mower until at least July 15th, and our deeply-rooted Midwestern sense of obligation to keep “a clean farm.” However, the simple argument that “a clean farm” is a closely manicured one, from the barn yard to the ditches, arguably falls short. Stands of wildflowers and grasses in roadsides, idle areas, and barn lots provide aesthetic beauty, habitat for everything from butterflies to deer, and play an important role in keeping our air and water clean. Roadsides – and all the other wildflowers – matter!...
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The key to successful integration of productive crop or pasture ground and healthy wildlife populations is to find opportunity areas on your property to manage to promote wildlife.
Picture a weed. Or better yet, a mess of them.
Now, what if I told you to turn to a stranger contemplating the same question and share your imaginings: do you think you’d have pictured the same place or plants?
My guess is no.
Sure, I suspect some non-trivial proportion of Iowans reflecting on my prompt let their mind drift quickly to a stand of waterhemp towering over soybeans. But too, I bet just as many (almost certainly more actually) pictured piles of lambsquarters seedlings next to neat row of emerging garden plants. Others pictured a yard carpeted in yellow blooms in early summer, while some picture a pasture overrun with leafy spurge or Canada thistle. Others still, an image of a woodland carpeted in honeysuckle or garlic mustard. Among the boaters, perhaps a lake in August and a with propeller sheathed in an endless twine of submersed plants.
Now, I’m going to get back to this hypothetical, but let me take a brief pause for a confession. Wildlife, and thus wildlife biologists like me, love weeds. A drive past my house in Ames, where you’d see purple coneflower growing from cracks in my sidewalk, cages around volunteer walnut trees in the yard, and a whole third of the lawn in transition from what past owners mowed and yours truly does not, would provide sufficient evidence. Visit the addresses of other wildlife lovers like me throughout Iowa and you’ll find more of the same. We tend to go the way of Ralph Waldo Emmerson’s assertion that a weed is “a plant whose virtues have never been discovered.”
..... continue reading the whole blog post on the Iowa Learning Farms blog here.
