Waumandee Farm

Welcome. This is a web site that we (Marcie and Mike O’Connor) have set up as a tour of our farm in Western Wisconsin.

Wamandee Farm is in an area of Wisconsin which was never covered by glaciers, so the landscape is very rugged, with steep rocky hills and deep valleys. Before the area was settled, in the mid-1800s, the hilltops and the southern and western slopes were prairie and savanna. The east and north hillsides were dry oak forest. The wider valleys were wetlands with sedge meadows and wet prairie along the edges of cold spring-fed streams. The narrower valleys had intermittent streams with a tangle of shrubby vegetation.

Our farm was first settled in the 1850s, and for many years was a family dairy farm. In the 1970s most of the farming activities stopped except on about 150 acres which was farmed in alternating crops of corn and soybeans. We bought the farm in 2000, and have set ourselves the project of trying to restore the native prairies, woods and wetland that were here before it was farmed.

Each of the pages on this site shows a different area of the farm. We have numerous prairie remnants that we’re maintaining and enlarging and a large wetland along the creek with sedge meadows and wet prairies. We’re trying to eliminate invasive, non-native species, and we’re gradually planting prairie seeds in all the old crop land.

If you want to see the story of our progress, information on the restoration, and what’s happening at the farm right now, Marcie has a blog about the things we’re doing and seeing at the farm.

Now it’s the second year, and we started to see some prairie plants growing among the weeds.

This is a view from July 2003. The white flowers are Fleabane (Erigeron sp.), which is a native weedy species (that we didn’t plant) that seems to like new prairies. There are a few other prairie flowers blooming - Black-eyed Susans and Wild Rye.

By the end of the summer I found 26 prairie species growing - out of the 109 that we planted.

Here’s another view with our walking path.

One of the weedy natives that is common in 3 Finger Valley is Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica). In the middle of the summer I found hundreds of Milberts Tortoiseshell caterpillars all over the Stinging Nettle. They are one of several butterfly species whose caterpillars eat nettle leaves.

Here are some of the caterpillars.

They crawled all over the leaves and each other, and completely defoliated many of the plants. Later in the summer we saw dozens of Milbert’s Tortoiseshell butterflies. Here’s one on the driveway.

The first year of a prairie planting is very discouraging - it just looks like a field of weeds. I walk across the field looking for some of the tiny prairie seedlings, but seldom find any. The seedlings spend most of the year putting down deep roots, and it isn’t until the second or third year that they start to grow much on top. We mowed this prairie about 3 times over the summer to control annual weeds.

This is the way it looked in October of 2002.

Here’s a picture taken in the winter of 2002 from the edge of our neighbor’s land. You can see the long narrow part of 3 Finger Valley, and at the far end you can see into the middle finger and just a little of the western finger.

In the fall of 2001, after the soybeans were harvested, we divided the field into acre sized areas using wooden stakes.

Here I am, spray painting the stakes so we can see them.

Here’s what the whole area looked like after we finished staking.

After this photo was taken, Mike mowed the center strip of weeds, so we could plant seed there too.

In December of 2001 we hand broadcast a mixture of prairie seeds over the whole field. We planted seeds of some aggressive species into the center strip since they had to compete with an aggressive mix of species that were already growing there. We got all the seeds on the ground before there was any snow, so the planting was easy and went very fast.

We use a slightly different mix of seeds for each prairie we plant. This year I made the mix so that we would have about 40 seeds in each square foot - 12 grass seeds, and 28 forb seeds. I planted the seeds of 12 different prairie grasses, and 97 different prairie forbs.

The Narrows Prairie is a long narrow field that follows the ridge at the northern edge of our property. Just to the north there’s a steep wooded slope down into the next valley. During most of the year we just get glimpses of the view, but when the leaves are off the trees we can see some of the valley and the tops of some of the nearby hills. The field is about 13 acres.

This is a photo that was taken in the early spring of 2000 showing the stubble from last year’s corn crop.

This was taken later in the summer after the field had been planted in soybeans.

Center Valley is a wide valley running about half-way up the center of our land from south to north. It’s divided by the driveway into eastern and western halves. Both sides have been planted for many years with alternating crops of corn and soybeans.

The southern part of the eastern half is very wet and hasn’t been cultivated since at least the early 1970s. Wetland sedges and flowers have become established there, and are starting to creep into the cultivated area.

The western half is drier, with an intermittent stream in a deep gully running along the edge next to the driveway.

This photo was taken from the road, looking north into our property, in the summer of 2000. You can see both halves of the valley planted in soybeans, and the line of trees which marks the intermittent stream down the middle.

This photo looks south, so East Center Valley is on the left, and the intermittent stream is along the driveway on the right.

The outside edges of both sides of the field slope up steeply to the edges of the woods, and also haven’t been cultivated for a long time. Those areas have vegetation typical of old fields - Field Brome (Bromus inermis), Quackgrass (Agropyron repens), Kentucky Bluegrass (Poa pratensis), Canada Goldenrod (Solidago canadensis), Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota), Canada Thistle (Cirsium arvense), and Raspberries (Rubus sp.).

This shows the view north from West Center Valley. High on the left you can see the old field area with lots of blooming Canada Goldenrod.

We decided that the cultivated part of this field would be our first prairie planting project. We left the wet area alone since it has lots of natives already, and we also left the “old field” areas to deal with later.

3-Finger Valley is a 14 acre field that has been cultivated for years with alternating crops of corn and soybeans. It has a long, narrow area that’s oriented north/south, and at the northern end it splits into 3 wide “fingers”.

Here it is in the summer of 2000 as a soybean field, looking north into two of the fingers.

And this is looking south, toward Center Valley.

This is looking up the eastern-most finger toward Goldenrod Valley.

The center of the valley is low and weedy - the farmer left a stripe in the lowest area unplanted and unmowed - probably to prevent erosion. (You can see it in the center of the first two photos.) It’s mostly filled with Canada Goldenrod (Solidago canadensis), Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) and Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica).