https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal Short's Resort Field Station (SRFS) — the public field journal of a Texas Hill Country restoration above the Lampasas River: its restoration sections, the instruments and infrastructure we build, and open plans and code. en-us https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/reading-the-ground https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/reading-the-ground Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:00:00 GMT Sampling the tract’s soils three ways: for the NRCS record, for the native seeding to come, and for the propagation bench’s potting mix. Every part of this restoration eventually comes back to the soil, so before the native seed is drilled and before the first trays are struck on the propagation bench, we spent a day with buckets, bags and a sharpshooter finding out what the ground actually is. Not what the county soil survey says it should be — what it is, section by section, in the year we start. Cores were pulled across the working sections and composited by area, bagged and labeled against the section atlas — the samples for the lab in one set of bags, the gathered soil for the bench in buckets. It is unglamorous work in July heat, and it is the cheapest insurance the whole project buys: a seed mix or an amendment chosen against real numbers instead of assumptions. The sample set goes to the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Soil, Water and Forage Testing Laboratory in College Station — the standard bench for Texas land work; the results go here. The numbers will shape the amendment plan for the converted acres, tune the drill mix where a section runs thin or alkaline, and set the recipe for the bench’s first potting mix trials. When the reports come back, they’ll be posted in this journal with the rest of the record. https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/why-we-are-doing-this https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/why-we-are-doing-this Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:00:00 GMT A plain accounting of the ground we were handed, the problems in it, our fixes and the trouble we expect along the way. The honest starting point for any restoration is a clear-eyed look at what you actually have. What we were handed is a tired piece of Central Texas: a hay meadow that has been run as improved pasture for decades, a river frontage thinned by grazing and uplands where a handful of tough introduced grasses have crowded almost everything else out. It is not ruined. But it is far from what this ground can be, and closing that gap is the whole project. This ground has come down through the family for four generations — cleared from cedar and farmed for seed wheat in the 1940s, grazed for decades, then held in Tifton 85 hay for twenty years. Each was the working use the land was asked to carry in its time. That is the inheritance; what follows is what it needs of us now. The dominant cover across the working acres is Tifton 85 bermudagrass, with King Ranch bluestem and Johnsongrass filling the edges. These are excellent forage and stubbornly good at their job, which is exactly the trouble. They form dense, single-species mats that shade out native seedlings, offer little to grassland birds or pollinators and leave the soil biology far simpler than a native prairie’s. A field of Tifton 85 is green and productive and nearly silent. https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/last-harvest-first-burndown https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/last-harvest-first-burndown Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:00:00 GMT The final cutting of Tifton 85 came off the field in late June. Now we turn roughly 45% of the property back toward native prairie. Last week, in the last hot days of June, the final full harvest of Tifton 85 bermudagrass came off the meadow. It was a strange thing to stand next to — good hay, cut clean and the last of its kind we intend to make here. With the bales off, the conversion can begin. Over the coming window we will treat roughly 45% of the property to knock down the introduced grasses that dominate it — Tifton 85 bermudagrass, King Ranch bluestem and Johnsongrass — and prepare a clean seedbed for a native mix. This is the single largest intervention the restoration will make, and we want to be transparent about exactly what it involves and why. We are not converting everything at once. Roughly 45% of the property stays in Tifton 85 for now — kept in hay until the native replanting proves itself out — and we will do our best to hold clean breaks between the standing Tifton and the new native stands. That retained hay carries a small but steady income that helps offset the cost of the restoration while the natives establish. https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/propagation-unit-1 https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/propagation-unit-1 Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:00:00 GMT Goals, and the full build list for the first semi-automated propagation bench. The first Propagation Unit is a three-shelf bench that raises native restoration stock from seed and cutting with as little daily attention as the work will allow. It is deliberately small: one rack, off-the-shelf parts and a controller anyone could rebuild in a weekend. The aim was never novelty — it was to see how much of a nursery routine can be handed to a cheap sensor and a valve so the field crew can spend its hours in the sections instead of at the hose. Hold each shelf inside a target moisture band; run the lights on a per-shelf photoperiod; move air with a variable fan; water only when a shelf falls below its floor, and never more often than its cooldown allows. Log every reading and every cycle so a season can be reviewed, not just remembered. The interface is public. You can open the same rack screen and dashboard the crew uses under Instruments & Infrastructure — in observation mode, so you can click through every screen without touching the live bench. https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/grants-secured https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/grants-secured Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:00:00 GMT Cost-share through NRCS EQIP, and a Texas Parks & Wildlife Pastures for Upland Birds (PUB) grant. The restoration is supported by partners, and we want to be plain about how. Two specific agreements now underwrite the work. The first is cost-share through the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service under the Environmental Quality Incentives Program — NRCS EQIP — administered by the Lampasas County field office. The second is a Texas Parks & Wildlife grant under its Pastures for Upland Birds (PUB) program, which helps landowners convert exotic-grass pasture back to native prairie for grassland birds. The NRCS EQIP cost-share is tied to named conservation practices — riparian buffer establishment, brush management, native seeding and a windbreak along the eastern boundary. Under PUB, Texas Parks & Wildlife provides the herbicide for the knockdown, the native grass-and-forb seed mix and technical guidance for converting our Tifton 85 hayfield to native prairie. Neither covers the cabin, and neither goes to anyone as a salary. If you are considering similar work on your own ground, both programs are worth a conversation with your local NRCS office and TPWD biologist — the paperwork is real, but the cost-share is what makes a project this size possible for a family holding. https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/the-cabin https://shortsfieldstation.org/journal/the-cabin Sun, 02 Nov 2025 18:00:00 GMT How a small holding in the Hill Country became a field station. The property begins with a cabin above the Lampasas River. Our great-grandfather — known to everyone as “Short” — was granted this ground in the 1940s after the federal government took his wheat farm in Killeen to build what became Fort Hood. He grew seed wheat here for years, and in the early 1960s built the cabin down by the river with his children. The family home was across the road on separate acreage, where they raised goats and sheep and cut hay; the cabin was the other thing — somewhere to cool off in the Lampasas after a day in the fields. They named it, half in earnest, “Short’s Resort,” and our great-aunts hand-painted the original sign. It has never had running water or electricity, and four generations on it still stands. We are the newest to keep it, and we still camp at the cabin most times we come down to work the property — which is how a good deal of this restoration gets planned, over a fire and a stretch of river. The name is a small joke that stuck: there is no resort, only a cabin, a river and seven sections of ground to mend. But it carries the spirit we wanted — that this is a place people are welcomed to, and that the work of restoring it should be hospitable too: legible, documented and free for anyone to borrow. So this became a field journal of our activities — what we learn, how we organize and track the work, and the problems and solutions we run into along the way. The sections are numbered, the species are recorded, the instruments are logged and the plans are open. An institution stands behind it — small, and mostly one family, but organized like one, because organization is what lets the work outlast any one season or any one pair of hands.