City hopes former sandpit will transform into prairie preserve

CEDAR RAPIDS - A former city sandpit has the potential to take root.

City crews this week harvested some 200 pounds of prairie grass seed and wildflower seed from a thriving prairie at the Indian Creek Nature Center with the plan to broadcast most of the seed along the Prairie Park Fishery's 1.7-mile trail.

"It's such a new site (that) we want to get the seed established before woody plants start growing there," Daniel Gibbins, the city's parks superintendent, said on Wednesday.

Gibbins said much of the seed being harvested from the Nature Center's prairie is coming from prairie grasses, seed which costs about $12 a pound if purchased from a private seller, he said. However, the Nature Center's seed also includes seed from a variety of wildflowers, seed that Gibbins said can cost $100 an ounce from a private seller. He estimated the value of the grass-wildflower seed mix being harvested from the Nature Center at up to $20 a pound or up to $4,000 in total value. The city is getting the seed for the labor to harvest it with the help of a tractor-mounted, rotary-brush seed collector borrowed from Linn County.

Rich Patterson, the Nature Center's director, on Wednesday said the nature center has about 30 acres of well-established prairie and so is happy to provide the seed to the city parks operation for it to establish prairies in city parks and along city trails.

"We've got more seed than we know what to do with," Patterson said.

It was not always so. Patterson remembered back to 1978 when he arrived at the Nature Center and turned his attention to transforming a weedy field into a native prairie. It was no easy task, in part, because the idea of prairie restoration was still in its infancy back then, he said.

It took years to beat back an infestation of multiflora rose bushes on the property to give prairie seeds a chance to take root and for the grasses and flowers to provide seed for more grasses and flowers and to turn a weed patch into a thriving native prairie. Volunteers and donations helped along the way, Patterson said.

This week, the city harvested more grass and wildflower seed from a part of the Nature Center's prairie than the center staff and its volunteers ever planted to start the prairie, Patterson said.

He said the first of the harvested seeds won't emerge into plants for a year and he said it can take seven to nine years to establish a prairie once the first seeds are tossed on the ground.

Patterson said the seeds include plenty of big bluestem grass, Indian grass and switch grass as well as yellow coneflower, purple coneflower, blazing star, butterfly milkweed, bee balm and Virginia mountain mint, to name a few of the wildflowers.