The blooms you see while hiking, biking or paddling the preserves next year could come from seeds that are nestled in plastic barrels today.

The barrels are being stored in a chilly Forest Preserve barn in anticipation of the seed being spread by small tractors in the preserves this winter. Throughout the year, the seed was plucked, cleaned, sorted, and stored by staff and volunteers.

The work culminated in the annual seed mixing day in mid-December when seed combinations were created that will be sown this winter in areas targeted for restoration. The restoration work will lead to blooms and better species diversity next year in the preserves. 

Celebrating seed

Seed mixing day is both an ending and a beginning for the Forest Preserve’s Conservation Department. 

“It’s sort of like a harvest celebration,” said Julianne Mason, the Forest Preserve’s ecological management supervisor. “We celebrate the seed we collected and it’s also a kickoff for the planting season.”

Each seed batch gets an ID number that indicates where it came from and where it will be planted.

“All the seed we’ve collected gets cleaned and processed and we’re at the stage now where we’re going to take the ones that will be planted in the same location and mix them together,” she explained as workers buzzed around her dumping seeds into barrels. “We know that certain bags of seed will be mixed with other bags of seed that will be planted at Kankakee Sands, or Hadley Valley or Monee Reservoir etc. And the seed mixtures are different based on habitat, soil type and the moisture levels at different locations.”

On seed mixing day, 1,200 pounds of native seed were combined with 6,400 pounds of rice hulls, a byproduct from rice production.

“That is a filler that makes the seed flow better through our planter,” Mason explained.

The mixing process has been modernized in recent years. Staff used to use pitchforks to mix the seed on the concrete floor of the barn, which took many more hours. But Mason read an article a few years ago about another nature organization that used a concrete mixer to combine seeds, which is now the Forest Preserve’s streamlined method.

The seed mixtures featured 150 different species of plants including black-eyed Susan, bottlebrush grass, butterfly weed, pale purple coneflower and tall coreopsis. Less common plant seeds included colic root, fen betony, pretty pinweed, savanna blazing star and scurfy pea.

Plants bloom in spring, summer and fall, so seed collecting takes place throughout the growing seasons. Some of the seeds are easier to harvest than others, Mason said. 

“We have a lot of Indian grass, big bluestem, wool grass and dark green rush,” Mason said. “But blue-eyed grass, yellow star grass, cross milkwort and all violet species are harder to collect.” 

The material has to be cleaned to extract the seed. 

“Picture a coneflower head,” Mason said. “It has seed, but also a big head that is clipped off when collected. So, we run those through a machine called a hammer mill, which shakes the seed off the head and chops it into smaller bits. We also have a brush seed cleaning machine.”

Hoping for snow

When seed dispersal work begins this winter, 40 to 60 seeds will be sown per square foot in the restoration areas. The seed will be spread “whenever conditions allow,” Mason said. 

Prairie plant seeds go through a process called stratification in the winter to sprout the following spring. 

“The seeds have to go through freeze-thaw cycles in order for them to be able to germinate,” Mason said.

Preserve areas are mapped to see which ones require seeding because they lack species diversity. And some are prioritized based on those evaluations. 

Now all Mason and her crew are waiting for is cold temperatures and snow. It’s easier to see where the seed has been spread when the white fluffy stuff is on the ground. But the seeds can be sown without snow.

Seed collection and mixing is crucial to the Forest Preserve’s mission of enhancing Will County's natural resources for the benefit of current and future generations, Mason said. 

“It’s the way that we plant native species over a large area,” she said. “Individually planting like you do a garden with trays of plants and plugs is not feasible over hundreds of acres. So, this is the way we plant at a scale that is meaningful in our preserves.” 

@willcoforests Ecological management supervisor Juli Mason is here to talk about seed mixing and will show you the steps of the process. #WillCounty #TakeItOutside #ForestPreserve #nature #seeds #conservation ♬ Lo-fi hip hop - NAO-K