General pasture grasses are "cool season" grasses (brohme, etc.) and grow tall and quickly early in the spring. You have to keep it mowed back to less than 8-10 inches or so. This allows sunlight to penetrate to the soil, as your prairie grasses, forbs, flowers and such NEED sunlight to germinate. Natives are "warm season" grasses...
After 2-3 years, if you keep up with it, the natives can outgrow the coolseason grasses, but if you let the brohme go, it chokes out the stuff you planted.
After 2-3 seasons, the root system of the natives are established enough to take SEVERE heat (from burning) and if you wait late enough in the spring, fire can help to kill to stuff you don't want, but won't hurt the natives. Timing is critical...around here, the counties burn in mid-late May or early June. One 80 acre patch is burned every year and they put in the local paper beforehand. It's done at night and folks drive a long way to watch - pretty spectacular...wind put the kibosh on that this year.
NRCS can really help you with the timing. I'll burn my first patch next spring, probably. Watch for the smoke...
In a lifetime, the average driver will honk 15,250 times. My wife figures I'm due to die any day now...
