BTC's Prairie Restoration Project

The southern edge of Blackhawk Technical College's Central Campus property was pasture land and had apparently never been cultivated leaving the majority of the native prairie plants there.  Since Blackhawk has owned the property, the area has become overgrown with invasive plants, mainly invasive European ornamental shrubs such as honeysuckle and buckthorn.  Over the years, a few people have worked to try to preserve it with this latest project getting started in 2004 by Chris Wellington and Nancy Lightfield.

Since 2004, we have had numerous work days, some formally organized and some very spur of the moment when the weather was good and people were available.  As of the fall of 2011, the open area for the growth of prairie plants has probably been tripled by cutting and burning the invasives.  In the fall of 2009, two Boy Scout Eagle projects were completed greatly improving the access and usability of the prairie.  A third Boy Scout Eagle project in the spring of 2010 was to build 2 small bridges over the wash going through the center of the valley.

April 1, 2010 Pasque Flower photos

Work Days:  We had a few work days in the fall of 2011.  Fall workday write-up.    Contact David Schmidtke, dschmidtke@blackhawk.edu or Kent Marsden, kmarsden@blackhawk.edu  if interested in helping restore our prairie

Prairie Progress: Although taken from slightly different perspectives, you can compare the spring 2005 aerial composite with the spring 2011 aerial composite to see the progress we've been making in opening up the prairie.  We now have a fairly open area all the way from east to west and when we started, there were a few places you could barely walk through.

Future Prairie Work:  We will continue to cut back invading Buckthorn and Honeysuckle.  A potentially bigger challenge will be to maintain the areas we've opened up.  We have a lot of new Buckthorn and Honeysuckle coming up from seeds in the areas we've cleared and until we have enough prairie vegetation to sustain a good fire to kill them off we will need to remove them manually.  That isn't hard but it is slow and tedious.  We also need to battle infestations of Spotted Knapweed, Queen Anne's Lace, Raspberries & Blackberries, and a legume.

Following are some links to information about the prairie project.

WACTE ConTech's newsletter (pdf file) has an article on page 7 with photos on page 8 which talks about the history of the prairie and what has been happening to restore it.

Spring 2011 Air Photo is a pdf file composite of a spring 2011 overflight, new as of 11/14/11

Air Photo is a composite aerial photo of the prairie area taken about April of 2005 on which I've marked trails to be developed and burn sites for burning brush

Updated Air Photo is the above document where I've added orange shading to the larger areas that have been cleared out since we started work on restoring the prairie.  There are a lot of individual bushes that have been removed which I haven't circled.

May 2008 Air photos:  These are two air photos that were taken by Peter Bales from Trade Wind International, LLC located at the airport.  They don't quite match up with the air photos above, but you can see a LOT of open area that wasn't there before.

1950 and 1969 Air Photos:  These are copies from the overflights on file at the Rock County Surveyor's office in Janesville with some description.

November 17, 2007 work day is a PowerPoint presentation about what we did on this work day.

BTC Home Page  David's BTC Home Page  Last updated 12/16/2011    dschmidtke@blackhawk.edu