Gardenbite: Boost Prairie Wildflowers with Winter Overseeding | #GoodGrowing

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, cortical educator with University of Illinois Extension coming at you from Macomb, Illinois, and we have got a garden bite for you today. Have well, I'm sure you've heard of overseeding lawns, but have you ever heard of overseeding prairies? Well, that can be done. So today, I would like to take you out to the wintertime prairie and show you overseeding the prairie.

So we are going to go to the Rezab family prairie. This is a small prairie just shy of about two acres in Macomb. This used to be a homestead and a cemetery. The old homestead building is gone, but the cemetery still remains. And the area where the prairie sits is actually where the old home used to be.

And so it's really good soil. There is a little bit of limestone probably from some of the foundation of the the barn and the home that used to be here. But for the most part, very good soil and good bones, I would say, for a prairie. So this particular project, we work together with the City Of Macomb and the McDonough County Historical Society, U of I Extension, Master Naturalists. And as always, every single year, I am joined on this overseeding adventure by retired city forester and a good friend, Tim Howe.

It's a great opportunity for Tim and I to get together and just chat about what else would you be chatting about in a prairie with a retired city forester, but trees, or as Tim likes to say, the higher forms of plant life. So when we are talking about overseeding our prairie, first thing you need is, well, prairie seed. This seed that we use this year and in multiple years in the past have come from our annual seed share. So every fall, several of our Master Naturalists and other conservation minded organizations and individuals get together after gathering seed for a good part of the growing season. We have all this is all native prairie seed or prairie.

Not not just prairies. We also do have like acorns, we have pawpaw seed, we have basically any type of seed of a native plant that could be found growing historically in Western Illinois, you'll find it there. So we gather together and we just share seed. So we gathered up our seed and we are going to pretty much every year we focus our species on forbs. Forbs are just the term we use for wildflowers and kind of prairie systems.

We want to try to avoid some of our grasses and some of the other aggressive forbs as well. We have plenty of grasses out at Rezab Prairie. We have bluestem. We have Indian grass. We have some of our switch grasses out there.

And we do also have some of our Canadian wild rice out there as well. But for the most part, a lot of our tall season our tall prairie grasses, they are a little bit more aggressive. So we try to avoid those. We stick predominantly to forbs. And if you are curious about what species we picked, I will have a list of those down below in the show notes.

So in this video, we are going to be spreading everything by hand. Yes, we want to get good seed to soil contact, and in a perfect world, we would probably conduct a controlled burn first before spreading seed, and then time spreading seed right before a snow event because then that snow would fall and pack that seed down closer to the soil surface. But we actually burned Rezab last year, so we're going to take a year off this year from burning and just schedule wise, we really just couldn't time our seeding efforts with a snow event this year. All right, so let's go through what we use to overseed our prairie. And I promise you other than getting the prairie seed, much is everything is something that you could buy or borrow or find probably in your own garage.

So while it might not seem like much, we do have this small paper lunch bag, and it is chock full of seed. There's thousands upon thousands of seeds in this paper bag. And a lot of these seeds are about the size of, like, ground pepper. They're very, very small. And so if we would, like, grab a handful out of that bag and just toss it in the air or toss it on the ground, we would be losing a large proportion of our seed to this one little spot.

And so we need to mix the seed with something. We call this a carrier so that we can distribute the seed a bit more evenly across a larger area. So a carrier is any type of inert material that can help us accomplish this goal. You can buy this online. You can find other things just probably local that you can use.

But some examples of different types of carriers that you can mix your seed up in are gonna be like rice hulls, sawdust, vermiculite, compost, sand. A lot of people even use, like, cracked corn or other agricultural grains like oats. They'll they'll mix it all in together just to to spread and get an even distribution of scattering the seed by hand. So today what we're going to use is we're going to use a bag of soil free potting mix because that's what I had. But first we are going to add our soil free potting mix to a large mixing bin.

This is like a little concrete mixing bin that you can get at a home improvement store. We're gonna put all the potting mix in there, then we're gonna dump out the brown paper bag of seed into the bin with with the soil free mix. As you can see, we break apart some of the larger seed heads, some of the seed pods, we'll break those apart by hand. And and then once we've broken up some of the larger pieces by hand, the next thing we need to do is we need to mix all the seed up with the potty mix. Now you can easily do this by hand, but what I found that mixes this up well and kinda makes short work of everything is to take a cordless drill and put a paddle attachment onto that.

And this paddle attachment is something, again, you'd find at a hardware store that's used for mixing something like mortar or like drywall mud or or anything like that. It works really well for mixing seed up in your carrier. And it gets everything really nice and evenly distributed and mixed into our mixing bin. Then once the seed and carrier are combined, the next thing you need to do is just grab a couple buckets, fill those up, and then take a walk. As you walk, you'll just be casting handfuls of seed into the prairie.

Here you can see Tim and I, we are strategizing which edge we wanna focus on for this year. Now there's no real method for sowing seeds that I can necessarily suggest. I know some people, they'll walk around, they'll do the salt shaker. They'll move their hands as they move. I like to grab a handful and just sort of flick my wrist and create this arc of material that then falls onto the ground.

I I really do like to overseed in the snow. I've got a picture of that right here. And as you can see, it it's really nice, especially if you're using a darker carrier material. It's easy to see where you've been, where have you spread the seed already. Actually, in this picture, we're we're overseeding Rezab.

It was a few years ago. It was on a negative 20 degree Fahrenheit day, and I was able to just snap one picture before my phone died from the extreme cold. But, yeah, you can overseed in any type of weather out there. And certainly, we are not going to be getting 100% germination using this method of sowing by hand. There's plenty of seed that just won't make it to the soil to germinate.

There's also seed that's just gonna get eaten by wildlife. However, us sowing by hand takes a page out of nature's playbook. And if it has worked for nature for millions of years, it will work for our small piece of prairie here in Macomb. And we know that our efforts are effective because where we have specifically targeted areas with our overseeding, we have seen over the course of years because this takes time. This isn't an overnight effect.

But we've seen over the years in our targeted areas a much more colorful display of of Forbes wildflowers where we have purposefully put that seed in that location during that. And and of course, I don't think I have any photos that I can necessarily share of that, but I'll hunt around, see if I can find something. If not, I'll share one of later on this growing season. Sowing by hand keeps it simple. If we were using a seed drill or some type of broadcast equipment, we'd have to calibrate everything.

But when sowing by hand, the only calibration is just kinda guessing how big of a handful to grab and how hard to fling or shake out the seed mix. And because we're not running the seed through any equipment, we don't need to be picky about cleaning debris of stems or leaves or whatnot. Well, I hope you enjoyed taking a trip out to the winter prairie, watching us overseed some forbs to provide a little bit extra color for our our city prairie here in Macomb. Well, the good growing podcast production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Chris Enroth. Hey, listeners.

Thank you for doing what you do best, and that is listening, or if you watched us on YouTube, watching. And as always, keep on growing.