Grinnell students plant prairie without using chemicals to kill grass

GRINNELL — On Grinnell College’s 120-acre campus is a fledgling prairie planned and planted by students.

The 5,200-square-foot triangle on MacEachron, or Mac, Field containing 40 varieties of prairie plants including coneflower, milkweed, purple love grass and little blue stem is more remarkable because the students didn’t use herbicide to kill the turf grass that used to be there.

“We realized it was going to be very difficult to get rid of the grass without using glyphosate, or Roundup,” said Grace Duffy, a Cedar Rapids native in her third year at Grinnell. But “we wanted this to be done without herbicides.”

The idea for the prairie was planted last fall when a Grinnell student proposed converting some of the campus to native prairie grasses. The student initiative proposal called “Too Much Grass” received support from 63 percent of student voters.

Grinnell student fellows for Herbicide-Free Campus, a national group that helps support students who want to eliminate synthetic herbicides on their campuses, got involved, as did Grinnell’s Center for Prairie Studies.

The volunteers started planning the prairie, with the help of Kelly Norris, a horticulturalist who was director of horticulture and education at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden for eight years. With only a few months before the prairie was to be planted, Norris didn’t think there was time to kill off the grass by covering it with plastic or cardboard, said Tommy Hexter, a fourth-year Grinnell student originally from Virginia.

“It seemed almost insurmountable to do it organically,” Hexter said.

The students decided to research whether they could manually remove the sod rather than killing it. They emailed groundskeepers at other college campuses and consulted with Herbicide-Free Campus and decided it could be done. They got a sod cutter, rented a dump truck and invited other students to help remove the sod May 1, rolling it up so the grass could be transplanted elsewhere.

“Right before the day, we posted if any community members wanted sod, they can come get it,” Duffy said. “We had a ton of people drive up with their pickups and grab rolls of sod because they wanted to fill in the holes of downed trees. That was a surprising benefit.”

Once the sod was gone, the students hauled in hundreds of wheelbarrows of compost to replace the lost soil. About 25 students showed up to plant the prairie seedlings May 8-13, packing 6,500 plants into the space to reduce the opportunity for weeds to get a foothold.

In planning the prairie, the students didn’t want to make more work for Grinnell groundskeepers. They think most colleges already have too few people maintaining too much land, which leads to more herbicide use. Instead, they created a student position for someone to take care of the prairie, weeding and watering as needed.

“This summer, I’ll be working on the college garden and the prairie space,” said Jacy Highbarger, a third-year student from Columbia, Mo. “In the future, we hope for it to be its own paid position in the summer.”

Hexter thinks making the prairie a labor-intensive project requiring lots of student volunteers generated more interest on campus, which hasn’t had as many in-person students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students who pushed a wheelbarrow of sod or got their hands dirty planting seedlings will be invested in the prairie for years to come.

“It was so powerful to see students all working together outside,“ Hexter said.

Comments: (319) 339-3157; erin.jordan@thegazette.com