Progress On My Small Acreage Prairie Restoration December 17, 2017

A lot has happened since the first post I did several months ago all excited about the dozen or so species popping up in my freshly bulldozed acreage. 
We cleared the land some time in late May / early June.  Not good timing, but one does these things when the people are available to do the work. 
Immediately, crab grass began growing.  I was uncertain what to do about that - was crab grass better than nothing in terms of protecting the soil from the sun burning up all the microbial activity?  I ended up doing nothing.  The crab grass seeded and there you go, billions of crab grass seeds were released. In hind sight, it seems obvious that I should have at least mowed the area to keep the crab grass seed from maturing and setting seed.  But the other thing that was going on was that 1) it was 100 degrees outside and I was not real anxious to go outside and walk around and think about next steps that involved a lot of work in 100 degree weather and 2) I was reluctant to mow down the native plants that were taking root.  I had hoped that I was going to see growth from a seed bank that held billions of native seeds resting in the soil just waiting for sun and space.  But no, crab grass.
The next thing we did is mow the top half of the clearing and spread two round bales of native grass hay across the area.  This was an effort to stifle crab grass growth, compost the soil, and mulch the soil.  By this time we were coming in to fall, in fact this was around the end of October. 
November passed with little activity beyond me spreading hay over the top half of the clearing  over a couple of weekends.  After the hay was spread, about two weeks after that, I raked away the hay forming circles of space, and I seeded the areas with Tickseed and Standing Cypress. I did this in maybe ten spots in the top half of the cleared area.  The seedlings have taken off - the weather has been very cooperative.  I did not seed the lower areas for several reasons.  We had those massive rains with Hurricane Harvey, and all the seeds that I spread in early fall (resulting from seed-gathering forays with Amy) were surely washed down the hill  (I expect to see some interesting growth in the spring (if the crab grass doesn't stifle it) due to seeds pouring downhill) and also because - one thing at a time!  I can't take on all these challenges at once.  After all, I have about 2 acres of gardens I'm already contending with.
During December I dug up bunch-grass plugs from around the property and transplanted them into the clearing.  Most of my efforts were in digging up what I believe are Little (big?) Blue Stem plugs.  So far I have dug up 42 plugs of native grasses.  I think most of them are Blue Stem, but there are other varieties as well.  All of them send up tall seed heads (some of the grasses I found on the property have adorable seed heads - real treasures).  They should be very pretty, they are certainly pretty when I drive around the place and look at them.  I think I will have better luck with the grasses taking off if they are moved in the winter while they are dormant.
I plan to try seeding grasses in the spring as well, but this winter effort is just to sort of get me going and get something established. So, when I plant these plugs, I am raking away the hay that I spread as mulch and compost, digging holes and planting my plugs.  Then I sort of "scooch" the hay back around them to protect them from drying out and also so that the hay can continue to decompose and fertilize.
I transplanted some verbena plugs from the back part of the property over to the clearing, I did that today, actually.  This is perennial evergreen native verbena. I have a lot of it in the back of the property.  I transplanted five plugs.  Hopefully it will thrive.  I'd love for it to take hold here.
I see a lot of mature tickseed in the clearing.  This is not from my seeding efforts, this is from the bull dozer work.  It's fairly near the Vegetable Garden, so clearly it is resulting from my throwing seed heads in the compost pile and then the bull dozer dragging it across the area immediately adjacent to the Vegetable Garden.  Whatever works!  I'll get some pretty flowers in the late spring from that.
One thing I really need to do is walk around and pick up all the patty squash lying on the ground.  That's another thing the dozer work did - spread squash seed all over the place.  I had 50 or so squash plants pop up after the dozer work.  The plants have since died off but the patty squash they produced are lying all over the ground near the Vegetable Garden.  I don't want them to re-seed again next spring.  I need to gather them up and throw them in the fire!
So, there we are with the state of things in my small acre prairie.