Know What You Mow - Hill Country Grasses

The last couple of years I've been learning my hill country grasses. As I've been selectively taking out my cedars, I've curiously seen several bunch grasses sneaking up in these clearings. I resisted the temptation last year to mow these down. Believe me it was not easy. I spent most my life in suburbia and learned to mow, trim, and edge the front and back yards neatly and squarely like my suburbanite peer pressuring neighbors.


After a while these fresh grasses coming up got pretty tall and a bit weedy looking to my culturally derived suburban tastes. I let them grow anyway - to the slight dismay of my wife. During these summer months I had been learning about the four great prairie grasses. You know - the ones that the pioneers said covered the buffalo prairies as far as the eye could see? The grasses that stood as tall as the covered wagons such as Little Bluestem, Big Bluestem, Switchgrass, and Canadian Rye? I imagined these beautiful swaying waves of grain someday being a part of my own little five acre hill country spread. This was when I went to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center native plant sale and bought a several pots of Little Bluestem.


I planted these grasses throughout my property and nourished and watered them hoping they'd take hold. While these potted grasses were being babied these other natural grasses that I was watching grow were getting taller and taller in lots of places throughout where I had cleared the cedar. I never learned what kind of grasses they were till late fall when it dawned on me that these were all Little Bluestems! The same grasses I had planted. I was over-joyed as I walked about touching and admiring these native gifts of nature that had been laying dormant in seed for years waiting for me to give them the opportunity to grow. I also found some Big Bluestem that came up that by the end of the year stood over six feet tall!


The Hays County Master's Naturalist class of 2008 did a site evalutation on my property this week and pointed out to me several other grasses I didn't know were growing on my property, including beautiful Switchgrass, Eastern Gama, and Silver Bluestem.


Today as I drove my borrowed John Deere riding lawn mower over my bottom land property I had to stop and start and go in reverse a bunch and sway and drive this way and that to avoid all these interesting clumps of grasses - that I now what to give a chance to grow so I can see what they turn out to be. Riding mowers don't seem adept to dart and dodge individual clusters of grasses. They're meant to go straight and cut - everything! It was harder than if I had been cutting in squared right-angles. But I realized nature just isn't very straight nor square. It is complex and varied like a crystal or a river or a spider web. By the time I was done, my wife thought I had forgotten how to mow. I said, with a sheepish smug look, "No, I did it that way on purpose."


Now that I know what it is that I am mowing, I am more more particular about what I slice with my mechanical toy wonder. I've come to enjoy the mix and match of grasses that are now growing everywhere on my property. It takes work, but I'm developing a taste for these prairie grasses that give me just a little hint of those great tall prairies that my forefathers experienced. I think even my wife is enjoying them too.