Seeding a prairie

I am glad this day is over. I can cross one stressor off my list. I’m not sure how it happened. I was just trying to be a team player, and somehow I ended up being responsible for recruiting 30 people to seed a prairie. The college received a donation of 10 acres of farmland maybe a year and a half ago. A creek divides the land, making it impossible to get to the back part without permission from a neighboring farmer. The part next to the road is in hay. The land was donated during a corn year. I advocated for waiting until now to plant as it is easier to seed after a bean year, which leaves less residue than corn stubble.

I know from our experience taking our property out of production that you don’t want to cancel the contract with your farmer until you are poised to seed something else. Thus, I have been in a semester-long scramble to line up the seeds and volunteers for the seeding. The seeds involved a certain amount of head-butting with the business office over bids, which delayed us at least three weeks. Then there was Thanksgiving. We scheduled the seeding for today and held our breath that we wouldn’t be in the midst of a blizzard.

The volunteer recruitment began two weeks before Thanksgiving. By Thanksgiving, I had three people signed up. In desperation, I offered extra credit to my students. I got 12 names. At the last minute, 17 employees and community members also signed on. As the day approached, the weather forecast looked better and better, perhaps as warm as 40°F, low winds, and rain the following day. Perfect.

Terry found a beam that could be used as a temporary bridge. We took it out the weekend before to be sure it was long enough. I spent Friday afternoon with Caron, our seed supplier, and Sharon, the chair of the property committee, marking off 16 quadrats.

Terry and I got over to the property at 10:30. I worried that getting the beam positioned would take longer than it did. In fact, we had it all set in about 5 minutes. To his considerable credit, Terry did not get cranky about me hauling him out there an hour and a half early. It turned out to be a good thing that we were there when we were because one of my students showed up shortly thereafter, thinking that we were starting at 10:00. She and her son waited in the car until we got started.

As more people arrived, it became apparent that I had made a major mistake in the directions. I had told people to turn west on Highway 173 in Harvard, which was correct, but added that it was a right turn if one was northbound. That, clearly, could not be true. I have struggled with right/left my entire life. I don’t know why I still even try. I was profoundly embarrassed. “Don’t worry about it,” Kim said, “Everyone has cell phones with GPS these days.”

I also worried about how we were going to get 16 bags of seed over the creek. I suggested that we get the volunteers in a line and pass the bags in brigade fashion. This worked exceedingly well, with 8 people between Caron’s truck and the bridge, three people on the bridge, and one person on the far side to stack the bags. Another 5 minutes and that was done.

I stood in the water in my Wellies to give a hand to the less confident as they walked across the bridge.

Caron instructs volunteers

We dropped one aliquot of seeds in each quadrat. We assigned one volunteer to each quadrat with instructions to go easy with the seeds and keep in mind all the area that had to be covered. Even so, most of us ran short. Luckily, however, we all started at the center. Caron was thinking of getting a different seed mix for the edges anyway.



Spreading the seeds; seeds bags have been distributed along the midline

After an hour, the seed bags were all empty. During this time more people had shown up, bringing the total to 20 or so. We got everyone down at the west end and instructed them to walk back and forth to try to walk the seeds into the soil. Good contact with the soil is critical for germination. The top inch of soil had thawed in the warmish weather, which was exactly what we needed.

Walking the seeds in

After half an hour of walking around, I again positioned myself standing in the water next to the bridge, and everyone crossed to the east side. Then we ate cookies and drank hot chocolate until 2:00. Just as we were packing up, another one of my students (the fifth of the 12 that signed up) pulled in. Oh well. I’ll give him some points for showing up.

Lessons learned: 1) get the directions straight; 2) just say “from noon until done” rather than “noon to 4:00.” But you know what? It’s done. Now I can devote myself entirely to my anxiety over taking a group of students to Belize next weekend.