The Joys of Burning Meadows

By: Jeff Kiplinger

When we bought our house on nine acres in 2013, we decided to open up some of the scrubby woodland and began a long process of learning how to increase biodiversity on the land.  We wanted more diversity of native plants and trees, fewer invasive plants, and habitat for birds and insects.  Instinctively – without much reasoning about why this was important – we cleared and left some areas open as “meadows”. 

We have three areas we call meadows, ranging from 1/8 acre to just over one acre.  They are very different.  One is mostly native grasses on a rocky dry rise, another is on a clay soil slope ending at the edge of a pond.  The latter has a variety of flowering plants amongst tall grass clumps.  Managing these areas involves keeping invasives at bay, cutting out woody volunteers, and burning.

Many people control growth in their open meadows with an annual cutting.  We found this difficult to manage for several reasons – the brush mower cut unevenly and left patchy heaps of heavy cut material, the fall cutting we tried didn’t help the fields select for warm season grasses over invasive cold season species, and we felt cutting every year was depriving overwintering insects from their homes.  We knew by then that it was the insects that were responsible for the resurgence of nesting birds on our land – birds rely on soft-bodied insects like caterpillars to feed nestlings.

So we decided to try burning.  Early on I used a propane cylinder and torch to light fires and hauled long hoses around the property.   This was a heavy job, and it didn’t always work well if the weather was still cold and wet by the time the annual two-month burn ban approached on March 15.  Eventually I learned to cut firebreaks, use a drip torch, and light backing fires to control burns in manageable sections.

We also hit on the procedure of burning only one of our three meadow areas each year, so that each was burned on a three-year rotation.  This avoided killing all the un-emergent insects.  Now we see that birds and bugs both seem to like the varied habitat – the burned fields offer much more visible green in April, a few weeks after a burn. By August the fields are lush and not as overgrown looking as the unburned ones. 

I’m not going to give a recipe about how to burn a meadow – everyone’s land and dangers to plants and structures will be different.  But burning small-ish open areas is an achievable landowner job, with research, planning, careful firebreak cuts, and maybe some friends to help.  

Here are a few pictures from our most recent burn, on March 15 this year.  This was the last day before the annual burn ban, and we were fortunate with good conditions – wind the day before that dried the grasses, and a gentle breeze and cloudy sky for the burn.  While this management technique is not for everyone, it may be something worth trying if you’ve decided on native grassy meadows instead of lawn.

Photo credits: Avalon Bunge, Tracy Murrin, Steve Fahmie