Winter Seeding Represents ‘Turning Point’ in EWU Prairie Project

Native grass plantings check an important box in Palouse Prairie restoration effort.

After overcoming obstinate weeds and uncooperative weather, members of Eastern Washington University’s prairie restoration team recently announced another milestone in the project’s development — the seeding of native grasses across the whole of its 120-acre restoration site.

It’s an important step, Prairie Restoration Project leaders say, in advancing the university’s plan to devote a third of its campus land to reestablishing a patch of Palouse Prairie — an ancient ecosystem largely lost to agricultural development. Already the ongoing restoration is serving as a “living laboratory,” a one-of-a-kind hub for interdisciplinary collaborations and research.

“We’ve learned a lot through this seeding process,” says project head Erik Budsberg, the director of sustainability at EWU. “Living systems are very dynamic and there are always going to be complications that come in: challenges that you weren’t expecting.”

Among those challenges was the persistence of non-native, broadleaf weeds on the site that, in earlier testing, had proven lethal to native grasses. “What we learned in our pilot project was that there were a lot of noxious weeds; invasive species,” Budsberg says. Taming the floral interlopers involved repeated mowing, tilling and, eventually, herbicide applications to completely clear the ground.

“I think we got the site looking about as pristine as you possibly can,” he says.

“We’ve learned a lot through this seeding process,” says project head Erik Budsberg, the director of sustainability at EWU. “Living systems are very dynamic and there are always going to be complications that come in: challenges that you weren’t expecting.”

Once the soil was ready for seeding, Mother Nature stepped up to offer her own complication; namely a warm, wet early winter. Counterintuitively, prairie grass seeds require sustained cold to sprout in spring.

“What they need is called cold moisture stratification,” says Erin Endres, an EWU nursery services specialist whose work is crucial to helping the prairie bloom again. “That means they have to be planted in the cold to break their dormancy and germinate.”

Getting the timing right fell to Chris Fitzner, a local farmer whom both Endres and Budsberg also credit with being instrumental in site prep.

“Chris just had to sit there and wait for the right conditions,” Budsberg says. “We needed it to get cold, and then stay cold enough so that the seeds wouldn’t germinate too early. You don’t want them germinating until the springtime.” Then there were issues with the soil not freezing sufficiently for the drill seeder — a specialized planting mechanism developed for no-till farming — to operate effectively. “So he waited until we got a good ground freeze,” Budsberg continues. “When it finally came, Chris went out at ten o’clock at night and seeded the site until three in the morning.”

That sort of dedication is typical of those working on the prairie project, among them student and faculty contributors from EWU programs including biology, geosciences, environmental science, education, visual communication design, English, technical communications, public health, anthropology and archeology.

Budsberg and Endres say they’ll know in the spring how successful the seeding has been. But they’re confident that, thanks to the intensive planning, research and plant-science expertise that preceded this stage of the project, they’ll see results everyone can be proud of.

“With getting these grasses in the ground, I think we’re truly at a turning point,” Budsberg says.