Ep. 332 Which Prairie Species to Grow If You Want to Start a Prairie Farm

Written By Hoksey Native Seeds

Laura Walter, of the Tall Grass Prairie Center, joins us to discuss the new species she is trying to grow at her facility. Also, which species is no one else growing that she has available for new growers. We also talk about hemiparasites and more. We loved this episode of the Prairie Farm Podcast, and you will too!

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  • Laura Walter (00:00.512)

    I'm Laura Walter, Plant Materials Program Manager for the Tallgrass Prairie Center at the University of Northern Iowa and President of the Iowa Prairie Network. And this is the Prairie Farm Podcast.

    I'm Mark.

    I'm Dr. Julie Meachin.

    Steve Hanson, I'm Jilby Bell.

    Chad gravy. My name is Jeremy French.

    Laura Walter (00:19.338)

    Laura Walter.

    Carol Hochspurian, owner of Hoxie Native Seeds, and this is the Prairie Farm Podcast. This is Hal Herring, Backcountry Hunter's and Angler's Podcast.

    Gipsley, Iowa Whitetail, Valerie VanCoten, State Historical Society of Iowa, Dr. Matt Helmers, Iowa State University.

    My name is Kyle Laubarger with the Native Habitat Project.

    I'm Judd McCullum. I appeared out of the wilderness and this is the Prairie Farm Podcast.

    Nicolas Lirio (00:44.758)

    Welcome to the Prairie Farm Podcast.

    I don't know, people sometimes have this impression that...

    Lean into the mic. I'll probably use a bunch of

    All right, yeah, one of the impressions I think some people have of tall grass prairie centers that we're somehow a big operation, but we're really small. mean, since we're not producing large quantities of seed for direct restoration, we're producing kind of small quantities of seed for other seed growers to use. We're little potatoes here. And so we have these lab scale machines in our seed cleaning.

    room and I've seen in some of these larger places air screen cleaners that are as big as our entire seed cleaning lab. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just interesting to see that there's just a lot of variation in scale.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:38.328)

    good at seed cleaning. I've heard mostly negative reviews about it.

    Air screen? They're kind of my go-to for most things. A lot of times we'll run things through a brush machine first or a de-bearder. A lot of times we use our brush machine to get seed out of capsules, take appendages off seeds, and then we run it through an air screen cleaner.

    Isn't a clean or a kind of gravity tape? Not a gravity table, but aren't they very similar and that they're like blowing air up through the screen?

    They know they've got aspiration. So they've got like a sieve boat and ours have three sieves, two scalping screens and a sifting screen. And those are rocking. then they, it's a fanny mill basically. Yeah. So it aspirates the seed before it goes into the sieve boat and then it aspirates the seed after. And with some things, you pour it in the hopper and it comes out clean the other end. Like I like to,

    Very similar to like a fanning mill.

    Laura Walter (02:38.038)

    My student, Addison, is wonderful in the seed lab, but I like to make sure that they don't get too frustrated with the difficult stuff. so every now and then I give them something. debilitating. Exactly. mean, you tear out these things.

    That's a word for it. Yeah. That's a very good word for it, you just like, it's like, what do they call it? Paralysis by analysis where you're just like, at some point you just, you're standing there like, done everything. Back to square one.

    demoralized.

    Laura Walter (03:03.106)

    Yeah, exactly. But every now and then we come up with a breakthrough and figure something out. We keep track of all this stuff. So we have a binder full of settings. You probably have the same kind of thing.

    Google slides. Yeah. a slide for with the information. You can share it so easily.

    really? I see. Yeah.

    So I mean, it's a and it's not like. I mean, that sounds nice. you got a Google slide. So when you're cleaning out New England Astor, you know all this. No, you don't know all the steps because you don't know. Yeah, exactly. I your heart is.

    It changes from year to year. Some year you have bigger seeds that are produced, some year they're real small.

    Laura Walter (03:44.078)

    Some users thrushes better in the field.

    Or maybe it was really dry. So you have the dry weeds versus a wetter year where you have totally different. Yeah. Or you just plain did a really great job weeding that field or you did a really bad job.

    yeah, if you miss this one weed that is not going to separate from anything no matter what. yeah, we had an interesting challenge this year. have a new grass species that we started in the field. goodness, did we? Yeah, we put that in last spring and it's one of the little rosette panic grasses. It's called dicanthelium acuminatum and it's low growing. It produces a flush of seed in like mid to, yeah, about mid July.

    Okay. And that's on an extended little seed stock, like a little, and it's a nice little panicle. Hmm. But I don't know, I was busy and I missed that window. And so we waited until the fall seed and the fall seed is produced down amongst the little tufts of leaves that are like right on the ground. The you want. And so the field had also gotten a little weedy and so we had some crab grass in there and we.

    Yeah, it's not

    Kent Boucher (04:52.782)

    That stuff is so frustrating.

    It could be quite gross. I mean, they're grasses.

    don't get much of it at Hoxie, but at my house. It's crazy.

    Well, and you so if you if you had something that tested and had a little bit, you know, point one percent crab grass and I threw it in a CRP field with a bunch of tall grass. It's not a big deal if you're going to. But what I worry about is putting it on someone's yard and their 400 square foot backyard prayer.

    Nothing

    Kent Boucher (05:17.142)

    The good thing about that though is if you're gonna have a small prairie like that, you should expect more maintenance. Like you should. Because you have such a small area that one problem really stands out.

    Yeah, I could talk all day about my backyard pretty much, but I want to get back to the dicanthelium. And so we went out in October, I think it was, with my student and with Cedar Falls High School student who was helping us out, his name was Jordan. And we were like on, it was not even hands and knees, we were sitting and clipping these plants off the ground. And we had gone through and weed weeded, but we didn't get all the crabgrass out. And so after that seed was dried and Addison ran it through the seed cleaning equipment.

    They got to the point where it was a beautiful batch of seed, but there was still crabgrass in it. I mean, it was visible. So you know it was bad. And a couple of weeks before that, I'd been looking through the seed lab with one of our volunteers who's a retired industrial engineer. And he was looking through it and he's saying, you know, you'd have a lot more room in here if you got rid of some of these things you never use. And he looks at our belt separator and he says,

    When's the last time you used this? And I said, I've never found a good use for it. I've worked here in years. And he said, you should get rid of that. Well, that day that we had the crabgrass and the dicanthelium, I'm like, well, dicanthelium, the little spikelets are round. I'll bet it would roll right off this slanted surface. And I'll bet those little crabgrass seeds are flatter. I bet they'd stay on there. What's the chance? We tried it out.

    It worked like a charm. I'm sure we didn't get every last crabgrass seed out of there, but like you said, know, these are not the weeds that we worry about so much in restoration. Those annuals that tend to decline when you have a good established stand. And that seed is out there in the environment anyway. mean, heck, those crabgrass and foxtail and stuff like that's out there in the soil. It's not like it's coming in from conservation.

    Kent Boucher (07:04.29)

    Yeah.

    and

    Kent Boucher (07:13.324)

    Yeah, I want to talk with you about that a little bit. I guess it just would be some really good practical stuff for our listeners. Common things showing up in backyard prairies that you don't want. You just named a couple of them there. Dandelions, white clover, maybe red clover if you're in a, maybe a housing development that used to be a hay field at one time or an old pasture or something.

    Let's see, maybe some wild lettuce. How bad are those in a prairie? Because they're kind of difficult to get rid of. There's just so much seed stock in a yard soil column of those weeds. And I think especially like clover, where you got those heavy, know, legume seeds. Plus there are some different prairie engineered

    herbicides out there that will hit everything but grass and legumes, but there again you're dealing with a legume so you can't even use a broadcast spraying technique like that on something that grows really close to the ground and all throughout an area.

    So you're talking about backyard prairies and here I'm going to be talking as an amateur enthusiast as opposed to as a professional because I have a bunch of prairie plantings in my yard. My first thought is that some of those annual weeds that you talked about, your lettuce and your fox tails and your crabgrass, just pull them. Yeah, the roots come out easy.

    Sure.

    Laura Walter (08:57.994)

    I guess that's easy to say if it's a very small planting, if it's a little bit larger, you'd a lot more work ahead of you. Another thought would be that some of those annuals, if you've got a good establishment of your native stand, those native perennials are going to overtake those. So maybe you do the, know, the mow the first year kind of an approach.

    John Judson says he moat least two, just all the way through.

    Those for like three years, right? Yeah, and he gets he said that that improves establishment of some of those more conservative native species like lead plant and such. really? In any case, getting back to your question, I do have problems with white clover in my home prairies. It tends to invade the edges and I tend to pull it or cut it. You know, I try to find the center that that plant is coming from and kind of keep up with it before it gets too well established.

    Okay.

    Laura Walter (09:50.506)

    The thing that I really worry about is quack grass.

    okay.

    Because it spreads aggressively by rhizomes and can form quite a dense stand. It can form like a turf almost. And that thing is perennial. Okay. And so it just gets worse and worse and worse. That's good to I am not friends with quack grass. And there are probably other perennials, I mean, it's kind of like brome grass in more of your conservation plantings and.

    All right, but if you could snap your finger and get rid of Brome grass or quack grass or read Canary.

    stop. These, these impossible choices. can't handle.

    Kent Boucher (10:29.198)

    Well, thing about Reed Canary though is it is not entirely, but pretty well- to wetter soil, which isn't going to be most backyard prairie.

    Yeah.

    Yeah, and smooth brome is a bigger problem, think, across the conservation landscape.

    Yeah, that's if Smooth Brome just couldn't grow back this year, would it just we would just have ditches and ditches of Foxdale, you think?

    Yeah, probably. We'd have some of those ruderal species would definitely be released.

    Nicolas Lirio (10:58.776)

    There's a lot of big blue Indian grass, like seed stock and ditches. It's just all over, even if they were never planted, it's just all over the place.

    How do you feel about native, what we determined to be weeds, as far as like, a big one that I get in my yard is wood sorrel. yeah, Maristail can show up, Amaranth.

    So those B roads where it's unlikely to have been planted.

    Nicolas Lirio (11:27.362)

    Mayor's Tale.

    Nicolas Lirio (11:33.806)

    Not Palmer Amaranth, do you know the Amaranth we have in Iowa?

    There are several species, believe. Red root pigweed. You should eat it. It's delicious. Have you made greens from it?

    I think it's the red.

    Kent Boucher (11:48.96)

    I have not, but you've told me before that you like, used to eat that. Lambs quarter would be another one.

    Thanks.

    yeah.

    Wait, from the way we got to.

    These are foods, really. mean, these are traditional indigenous food plants.

    Nicolas Lirio (12:01.314)

    He interviewed Louis de Jager, who was like, man, we're all angry at these weeds. We destroyed the ground. These are the only things that can come up for two or three years. And we're mad at them. He's like, you know, if there was a nuke, these things would save our lives. They literally like saving them.

    Humanity. amaranth, you can not only, you can eat their leaves, you can eat the seeds. mean, those things are a powerhouse. And yet we've decided that somehow they're planta non grata.

    Well, yeah, and that's what I've kind of started to think about it is there again, like the crabgrass, if you look into a mature stand of prairie, you're not going to see pigweed out there. And another one is Pennsylvania smartweed is another native animal plant that loves disturbed soil.

    But those are all early successional, right? Also, just to finish the thought, Amaranthus tuberculatus, which is common water hemp, red root pigweed, which is Amaranth retroflexus and smooth pigweed, which is hybrid. They're all native to Iowa, just according to a quick Google search.

    Those are all natives?

    Kent Boucher (13:11.374)

    Yeah. So, but I know a lot of people spend a lot of energy, us included, in hoxie. And for us, it's a little bit different because we're doing seed production. You need to have a clean seed test. But we spend a lot of energy on trying to get rid of those things. Should somebody be super concerned about a little bit of Pennsylvania smart weed in their backyard prairie in the first couple of years that it's establishing or a little bit of

    Interesting.

    Kent Boucher (13:39.852)

    you know, one of those native pigweeds or...

    You probably have more experience with this than I do because I just have, you know, I have my one little backyard and I have some some friends who've asked me questions over the years. Sure. I think a lot depends on your soils in the specific situation, your soil, your light.

    But what about even like an ag field? you had a cornfield and you planted, you know, CRP, you know, planting, would you be concerned about?

    some canaisa, mean marestail. I think marestail is pretty common and it's an early successional species that you're gonna see in lots of plantings and I would be not very concerned about that. I think you have methods for reducing the seed set of some of those things in that first year that sort of accelerate the transition to a more perennial stand like the mowing.

    And these are all really excellent questions for Justin. Can you guys talk that? I can kind of, I can talk about this a little bit, but my focus is mostly on seed production.

    Kent Boucher (14:41.676)

    I'm pointing to him.

    Kent Boucher (14:50.348)

    Yeah, yeah. Well, it's it's good to hear your experience because I know you've handled a lot of prairie in your time. So, yeah, it's, even if it's not your area of expertise so much, I've learned is.

    little prairie plantings in my yard. There's more failures than successes really, but I love

    There's a real value, and this is coming from some of you, as you know, as a science teacher for a long time, that there's, what I learned transitioning just from the textbook realm of things to the practical realm is that you need both. You need the good research, but then you need research played out in the field, seeing it happen. And I think you're one those people who has both those things. And Justin is too, because he does a lot of work out it.

    How do you say Irvine or Irvin? Irvin. Irvin. That's what I thought.

    Yeah, it looks like Irvine, but the family pronounces it Irvin.

    Kent Boucher (15:45.727)

    And so I think your guys' experiences is, I don't know, outsized in value because you have both of those things.

    Well, I think one of the things that's really, yeah, one of the things that's neat about working here is just the way that we can play off of each other with our different areas of expertise and interest and the different observations that we make. And we can chat about those and those things lead to new ideas that we can, if we've got the time and the funding for it, we can explore. I think what sets Justin and his program apart, and I don't know that he would be one to brag on it like,

    Not just academic, it's all about.

    Laura Walter (16:25.358)

    like I would is, well, there's a couple of things. And one of those is that his research is focused on applied questions. So these are things that have the potential to influence and improve what's going on in the landscape at a large scale. And then he's also very good at experimental design and data management and analysis. So he's not just coming up with good questions that he, you

    generates partly through, a lot through interactions with people, you know, who are working with the land. But he's also...

    developing.

    information that's based in rigorous research.

    Yeah.

    Laura Walter (17:18.742)

    And that I think is, I mean, he's not maybe the only person doing that, right? But he is doing it and it's important and he's doing it here with the kinds of problems that we see in the landscape. I say problem, I mean, problems and opportunities that we have here.

    Yeah, I think the stuff you guys are able to make available to other prairie enthusiasts and even people who do it for a career is incredibly valuable. when it takes, like even going back to the seed cleaning conversation, one of the most daunting things about using new equipment in the seed cleaning aspect of an operation is it's expensive. It takes up a lot of space and it's gonna take a lot of hours to figure out if it's gonna work for you.

    I don't know.

    Kent Boucher (18:05.196)

    You know, we had a gravity table for years.

    $25,000 and $5,000 to ship. That's what it was tiny.

    It was lab scale. Yeah. I was kind of.

    And I think it does, you know, it wasn't that the machine didn't work. just wasn't the right tool for our job.

    It would have been great for like Clover.

    Kent Boucher (18:25.186)

    hand or hand harvested seed. know, like if, you had very little weed seed, you know that

    Yeah, so you were just separating chaff from seed. Yes, it could get out chaff because chaff was just totally different, right? But weeds from weeds. And I actually think that if it was a lot bigger, because you would tell there was a difference, but the table was only like the actual. Yeah, it was maybe two feet by two feet, the actual screen section. And so I think if I think if the table was like 10 feet by 10 feet, you could have had a lot more. That's just a hypothesis.

    I even as big as this

    Kent Boucher (18:52.342)

    separation had to happen quick.

    Kent Boucher (19:01.816)

    was the size of this table, know. But the point being, we, you know, wasn't an inexpensive piece of equipment. And let's see, your brother-in-law, Aaron, tried to figure it out. Peyton tried to figure it out. Yep.

    Dad, try to figure it out.

    Carol, Riley and me, all of us tried, so how many hours of paying someone just to try and figure this thing out?

    Question for you. How many excellent YouTube videos are there about how to use seed cleaning equipment online? I have never been able to find good stuff. You it's always been a matter of you read the manual, the manual basically just tells you how not to kill yourself with the machine. And that gives you a parts list.

    Very few, very few.

    Kent Boucher (19:42.632)

    Yeah, that's right.

    Do not use this while standing in a swimming pool.

    Yeah, well some of the stuff

    Those manuals say to not do. We do those exact things.

    Okay, don't talk about those on the record. But then you rely on what somebody else tells you or if you've got some records in house and I, you we had some records in house and then it's just, you tinker. You the settings that work and that don't work and sometimes you, you know, you can be doing something for years one way and you, you know.

    Kent Boucher (20:12.078)

    That's right.

    Laura Walter (20:20.044)

    don't read the instructions right one time and you run the thing through and you're like, wait, this works better.

    The well, and I mean, we're can't, and I are speaking out of both sides of our mouth here just because like how biased we can come across because we are native seed. But the truth is. The people who are motivated to figure out seed cleaning and have the resources to figure it out, right, they're not they're not having to rely on grants or something like that, where you guys as resource is very limited, right? So nothing against you guys just.

    Your resources are limited here. All of their incentives align with definitely not posting a video on YouTube on how to.

    Right.

    Yeah, especially if especially if it did like you said took years to get it just right or something, you know, yeah

    Nicolas Lirio (21:12.79)

    And I've been in a breakout room group at a, you know, native. I've been to a bunch. You know, you go to these native seed conferences or, practical farmer stuff and you get in these breakout rooms and, you know, most people listening to this know what those breakout rooms can be at their best and that they're worse. I've been and it's an important part of the conversation, but I've been in more than one room where it basically devolves to the people who do native seed group and make art.

    not native seed group, the company, but do native seed production for money and those who are there because they are passionate about it. And I totally understand both sides, because if you're just doing it for money, it's like, you know, like, dude, just

    It's like your secret sauce. mean, you're not gonna give out your recipe for your barbecue sauce if your family has worked on that for generations. And I think that shows one of the fundamental differences between the native seed market and a lot of other similar agricultural markets. And that is that we don't have like an extension service that's doing a lot of the basic research for us. are- I mean, we're doing a little bit at a-

    You

    gonna talk to you guys.

    Nicolas Lirio (22:27.181)

    out.

    10? And volunteers and the summer people. But yeah, I mean, we're a small staff and really I'm the only person who's doing native seed stuff along with my part-time students. So we're tiny, but as a public seed producer, we are tasked with sharing whatever we learn from the process. But what we do at our scale is not going to be the same as somebody who's...

    I'm including interns.

    Laura Walter (22:54.666)

    moved up the scale and is producing hundreds to thousands of pounds of seed. But in any case, we don't have like a, there's not a whole educational institution like the extension service that's devoted to developing information and methodology and doing research that supports the native seed industry. If there were, I think things would move ahead so much faster, but I don't know.

    So there's actually, mean, it's interesting. So Iowa State Extension has a Iowa fruit director who I know and I like a lot. You know, I know that so I'm not bashing that guy, but they have a Iowa fruit guy and they don't have a person for native seed. Is that crazy? Now, to be fair, overall gross revenue.

    I know it's

    Kent Boucher (23:43.95)

    SU is a land-grant college. mean, its creation is to support...

    in my head.

    But know, native seed production is a form of agriculture and I would argue that having the access to native seed and to native seed plantings solve some problems in agricultural landscapes that make it valuable.

    I really like what Laura Jackson had been working on with Eastern Game of Grass, not out of like an extraction of what we can get from the land, but the idea that perennials can produce in a way that make acres economically viable, as Doug Durin says, not profit maximization, but economic viability is very appealing to me. I don't know if anybody's figured it out, except maybe grazing. I mean, we do it because we produce for, you know, other, but

    What are they using that land for when we put a well-established prairie on it?

    Laura Walter (24:42.334)

    Have you looked into the work of the Land Institute much? Okay, I think that's your homework after today is to look up the Land Institute and find out what their mission is because it is that idea of perennialization of agriculture is their mission. Have you heard of Kernza? Yeah.

    Yeah, okay.

    So that's one of the... Laura Jackson's parents founded the Land Institute.

    Parents are involved with that aren't they?

    Nicolas Lirio (25:11.308)

    Yes, and then, yes, I have.

    Were they working with, was it Rosenweed too?

    Yeah, early on they were working with Rosinweed and Illinois Bundle Flower and

    just to use them as a food item or.

    I think the rosin weed was intended as oil crop. were looking at the eastern gamma grass as a...

    Nicolas Lirio (25:33.355)

    I think is also an oil crop. think there was a guy who was buying a bunch of wild bergamot from us

    Yeah, there is.

    Well, there's some medicinal, you know, markets too, know, Echinacea or...

    Yeah, there's somebody producing, I think, Monarda that's enriched in essential, aromatic essential oils for, I suppose, purposes.

    I know we asked for our, tuberosa, our, butterfly milkweed. Is that the correct tuberosa? Okay. Cool. I, I, every year people call us.

    Laura Walter (26:08.268)

    Asclepias tuberosia.

    Kent Boucher (26:13.344)

    Now that Judd's putting mixes together and everything, Nick's going to start going blank on all these. yeah.

    Yeah, yeah, cause Judd's do, he's actually, I mean, I look at these lists all the time. Yeah, well.

    You have to practice languages or you lose them. So what about your Asclepias tuberosus?

    We get called every year people asking for the roots. Here's the problem. They won't give you a price. these it's very it's actually very frustrating, very telling about them. They're always on. They're always on the East Coast. And these brokerage companies, they know that farmers usually aren't good at bartering. So they they are have become accustomed to farmers ripping up their crop and then being like, what will you pay for it? And they're like, well, you already ripped it up. What are you going to do with it? And so they'll get a steal. And I just put my foot in the ground and said,

    We ain't doing that. And it worked wonders. I literally tripled the price and I was like, you were willing, you make so much money off your product. You could pay us triple the people growing the thing and you wouldn't, you know, and you refuse to give a price before they know what they could pay. was very frustrating.

    Laura Walter (27:11.63)

    Those are beautiful roots. Have you looked at them? Oh yeah. Yeah, they're so cool. actually in our, one of my kind of side hustles here is that I manage our prairie roots project. And so we have this root growing facility and we produce roots for educational uses. didn't know that. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So we grow them for a couple, three years in the ground and then we extract these roots and preserve them and we make them available to nature centers and museums to, well,

    Yeah

    Laura Walter (27:41.486)

    For a price, we have to support the program. It's a self-supporting program. Occasionally we'll get funding from Living Roadway Trust Fund to make some routes available for free for Iowa institutions, but we currently are not funded. So we sell these routes and they are wonderful ambassadors for the prairie because when you walk out in a prairie, you can see what's going on above ground to a certain extent if you're willing to pay attention and just get out in there.

    But you cannot see what they're doing below ground. And that is, I would argue, more amazing than what's happening above ground.

    And you know what? People are more amazed by it when they see those crazy root systems on the big blue stem. And if you go to hoxie native seeds, Instagram or YouTube, not the Prairie farm, hoxie native seeds, you'll actually see a video of Laura explaining this ginormous pardon me, this ginormous plant and root system. got a little reel up there on it because it's a, it's plant education and I'm trying to keep talking heads on the Prairie farm.

    Put it on the Prairie Farm.

    Laura Walter (28:39.338)

    And here's the thing though, the stuff that I could talk about these roots for a long time, but I'll try to be brief. But the thing that I didn't say, I was talking to you about how we grow them, but what I didn't say was just how many things that those roots are doing. And we think about roots as doing stuff for the plant. They're getting water and nutrients from the soil for that plant. But what the roots are doing for the soil and for the way water interacts with the soil and for the way

    gases from the atmosphere are converted into carbohydrates that are stored in the soil as organic matter. What they're doing for the life of the soil and the structure of the soil, all of those things are things that are invisible to the eye. And so I can see why people are amazed when they see those root systems. It's like, it's like the first time you look through a telescope and you realize that those little points of light out there, some of them are whole galaxies or nebulae and they're beautiful and they're, they're doing things out there.

    far from us where we normally can't see it. And here, we can make these root systems visible so that people can see what's going on or could go on beneath our feet, especially as we restore this to the

    The Horton hears the who effect, right?

    yes. my goodness. And you know, we actually got a chance a couple of years ago, we had some filmmakers who were doing a story that related to the Land Institute and Lord Jackson's family and that idea of perennialization of agriculture. And I think they called it Prairie Prophecy, the film is out there. And...

    Laura Walter (30:14.018)

    they wanted to get a look at what prairie roots actually look like in the ground, not the ones that we've produced in our root growing facility. So they got together with us. went out to Irvin Prairie, which is the restoration project that Justin directs. So it wasn't a remnant prairie. We weren't tearing up any pristine prairie, but it was a, I think a six-year-old restoration at the time. And our cooperating farmer, Brian,

    Got out there with his earth moving equipment, which he loves to use and he's an artist with this stuff. I mean, just amazingly skilled. And he created this trench and then we got TPC staff and summer students and AmeriCorps members and everybody down there with hoses and Brian helped us rig up a pumping system to keep from drowning us all in this pit. And we exposed the roots on the side of this thing. And it was just amazing.

    Yeah, how did it look compared to this? Because to me, as amazing as that is with the Prairie Roots program, just knowing what I know about plants, they adapt so well to the constraints of the system they're in. So, you know, the classic example would be a house plant, you know, leaning towards the window where the sunlight's at.

    Yep. Yeah, plants have amazing plasticity.

    Right, right. so do the roots in this controlled, you were describing it in the video again, go check it out on our Hoxidative Seeds Instagram, but through these PVC pipes that you're growing these down into, are they extending down further than what they normally would in a, if they were given an infinite amount of topsoil, would they grow?

    Laura Walter (32:03.31)

    Okay, have more homework for you.

    Kent Boucher (32:07.874)

    just like this, that deep down? Or would they broom out to be, you know...

    Like a Filipino broom instead of an American broom. You ever seen a Filipino broom? You know what talking about? They're like two feet wide.

    I have

    Nicolas Lirio (32:24.074)

    So there's so much better than normal brooms that my mom said when she moved back from the Philippines to the United States, she's from the United States, went to the Philippines for like 10 years, came back. There were people that would be come back from the Philippines with like, shoulders full of these brooms because they, they depreciate. They kind of fall apart because they're basically like a bunch of grass, like

    deteriorate, deteriorate depreciate means value.

    Yes, thank you. Deteriorate. Yeah. Yeah. he had to appreciate that.

    Here's my side comment for today to distract everybody from what the original question was and that is that I, you know, it was so much fun to see you guys at the Iowa Prairie Network Winter Seminar where you presented about the

    If you have not gone, you need to go. It is very enjoyable.

    Laura Walter (33:09.728)

    my goodness, such a vibrant organization. just love, I love it. And I don't say that just because I ended up the president somehow, but you were there and my husband saw you speaking. And when I mentioned today that I was going to be talking to you, he said, you mean the brothers? And he said, even if you don't look like brothers, you seem like brothers.

    Hahaha

    Laura Walter (33:37.331)

    And so when you're like correcting each other's use of English, I think it's just hilarious. yeah.

    I'm trying to figure out who that's more of an insult to.

    I was trying to think of who was more of a compliment to me, but you know, I got the rose-colored glasses.

    Yeah, yeah, social at the prairiefarm.com. You got opinions on who that was a bigger insult to.

    Okay, so I just started a contra- Very kind But Michael's, yeah, he's a good judge of character, I think. Oh, Well, I sure hope so. He's been married 32 years.

    Nicolas Lirio (34:02.613)

    So funny.

    Kent Boucher (34:09.838)

    His biggest, his biggest personnel decision.

    HR department.

    Now you watch it!

    Okay, sorry. I'm going to start coughing. So back to the roots. And your question was, if you free these things from their PVC pipe, how do they grow? Okay, so your other homework assignment, wiping away into your laughter here. one is, so the Land Institute is in Kansas. We're basically following my- Salina? Yeah, which I couldn't even-

    We talked about Layton Institute with so many different guests. We just need to go there.

    Laura Walter (34:48.525)

    You absolutely do. We should do some interviews. Yeah. And the flotilles. Okay. We should talk later, but anyway. So now we're to go to Nebraska. And one of the longest running scientific careers I've ever heard of was a man named John E Weaver. And I think he published his first paper in like 1915 or thereabouts.

    So he's not still alive. was like, we get them on the.

    I think his last paper was published something like 1965. So this guy was not only alive for a long time, but he was scientifically engaged and active for a long time. And he and his students would do things like excavating the root systems of prairie plants. And so the answer to do they get deep in nature is yes, they do. What they're doing down there is another question. And there's some interesting recent research like out of Konza Prairie about

    You know, like the first 30 centimeters, which is like a foot of the root system being the most metabolically active, or they're actually the part that's getting the nutrients in the water from the soil. It's mostly that top.

    That's what I heard. Chris Helzer wrote an article about it. Yeah. About like, cause we like, well, look, of course they can survive drought. Look how deep the.

    Laura Walter (35:59.054)

    And he's like, well, most of what's going on is actually in that top foot. And so it's really interesting that they do. I mean, that's a lot of material that those plants are putting down there that we're not quite sure what's up with that. But in any case, are down there. So J.E. Weaver's work, you really have to look up. Some of these papers are amazing and the illustrations in there.

    about him. I think Chad

    You know, Chad, I Chad gravy. He's like, he's like the dude.

    think I've met him, but I we've...

    He's out in, Les Hills at Hitchcock.

    Laura Walter (36:34.63)

    Right, yes we have met. cool. Okay, yeah, the roots are also gonna have a lot more lateral spread like you mentioned. And so when we did this big dig out at Irvine Prairie, a couple of things we noticed is really hard to wash the soil off the roots, which helps to explain why when we grow the roots for display, we grow them in an artificial medium that comes out more easily. Wow. But yeah, so we were hosing these things down. Is it because they're-

    little thread like little thread roots. Sorry.

    Yeah, lot of the root structure is, you know, these tiny little branches and they're actually interacting with and kind of glue. They exude like carbohydrate based substances that glue the soil particles together and help to attract soil microbes and they do all kinds of things in this zone between the root tip and the soil particles around it. So there's a lot going on there. And I just about told you everything I know about it. I took a class in college. Okay, right. So it's hard to wash this stuff off.

    A lot of the roots get broken in the process. But nevertheless, what we ended up with was like, it was like, you remember those bead curtains from the, no, you don't remember the bead curtains from the seventies.

    I think I

    Laura Walter (37:47.502)

    You've probably seen him in a movie, a really old cheesy movie, Yeah, I definitely know what you're talking old cheesy movie, right? But it was like a-

    yeah, they'd be between doorways. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

    I kind of part them all through. But that's what it kind of it kind of reminded me of that. It was like this curtain of roots and there are different species kind of intertwined and you could follow the roots like there was there was one compass plant in that that section. We tried to get close to that. We never could find the taproot of that one. We tried real hard. But there was a baptisia white wild indigo and our legumes. There's man. Paxilonymy keeps flipping back and forth and I can't remember what the other name is.

    Is that right? Yeah. He's trying to brag.

    Laura Walter (38:28.974)

    forgive me, but you could follow that and you could find the nodules on the roots, you know? And so it was a fascinating experience and there were, I think we got down, we cleaned stuff down to about eight feet and there were still roots going down. So yeah, so they do, they go deep and they go laterally and they're interacting with each other and with the soil.

    And they entangle themselves with other species. Is there any research?

    entangle, but they're kind of growing amongst, and that's why we oftentimes grow a forb and a grass together because the structures of the root systems are different. And so when we grow these specimens together, it's not quite as artificial then we've gotten a little bit of a tiny scrap of the biodiversity of the prairie represented. And you can see the different architecture of the roots of the forb species instead of the grasses and how they,

    seem to occupy different parts of the soil column.

    Do the roots interact directly with each other of different species? As I know that there's like legumes who will put nitrogen in the soil and then grasses will pull nitrogen out of the soil. But do the roots like ever touch each other and have an exchange?

    Laura Walter (39:48.736)

    Gosh. All right. So there's a couple of answers to this question. one thing I don't know is how common root grafting is between prairie plants. don't know how it ever occurs. Well, mean, where would you see it?

    Yeah, yeah. Did you see it at the thing at the

    She's just saying.

    It be hard to tell. would be. Well, are they actually grafted to each other? Are they just lying next to each other? mean, it would just be hard. You'd have to really be looking for it. And I haven't looked into research on that or seeing what's published.

    and it's just intertangled.

    Nicolas Lirio (40:24.393)

    You're not sure if there's evidence that it happens at all.

    I'm not sure. I think it's pretty clear that it happens with tree and shrub species, but I don't know about our species and grasslands. I just don't know. It's just not something I've looked into. But there is evidence that when you have a, you know, mycorrhizal community, these fungi that interact with the roots and that help supply the roots with mineral nutrients from the soil in exchange for carbon from the plant, that those mycorrhizae can...

    form interconnections among plants so that the mycorrhizal, the threads, they're hyphae, they're these living threads of fungus in the soil could actually be like a network of exchange of nutrients. Interesting. The other possibility is that, well, the other place where I can absolutely say yes to your question is when you have hemiparasitic plants that aggressively tap into the roots of other species where they have these structures on their root systems called hostoria that penetrate the

    the living tissues of other plants roots and then extract water and mineral nutrients and some perhaps some carbohydrates from them as well, depending on the species.

    Does benefit goes both go both ways with a hemiparesis site?

    Laura Walter (41:33.675)

    Nope.

    They're part of the rules of symbiosis.

    I didn't know, I know it was called a parasite, which I know is like, it just extracts.

    But it's a really good question because I think we love to have this categorization and the labels for things. in biology, those categories are rarely distinct. I think I could generally say that in a hemiparasitic relationship, stuff's going one way. I haven't even gotten to anything that I was planning on talking about yet. I always come in here with an agenda.

    Nicolas Lirio (42:12.834)

    We always go to work with an agenda. never get it.

    done. With the hemi parasites, I mean, in most parasitic relationships.

    No!

    Most parasitic relationships, eventually the host, I mean, if left long enough with the parasitic problem is weakened to the point where it could even die. Do we know if hemi-parasites affect their host plant to that extent to where they will eventually kill?

    relationship

    Kent Boucher (42:55.105)

    the host plant.

    So that's a super cool question. And my answer would be, I suppose it's possible and it probably depends on, you know,

    How much they're reproducing and maybe you know locally more of the hemi parasites start showing up and feeding off the same plant or

    Yeah, I'm thinking just like the nutritional status and the light available to the host plant to that kind thing.

    It wouldn't be advantageous to the hemiparasite for that.

    Laura Walter (43:22.68)

    Defer it to kill its host, right? Well, it's hard to assume that there's like a balance in nature. Things tend to kind of swing one way and the other. that's how the balance is more macro, right? And so there could be individual interactions where the host does die. And I suppose that's probably happened sometimes with hemiparasites in nature, but.

    This is more macro.

    Laura Walter (43:48.906)

    They're not existing with just a single host and the hemiparasitic species that I have worked with here are both in the genus particularis, the love swarts are betonese, those are the common names for those. And they're pretty broad in their host range. So, but just recently looking into some of the literature on their effects on plant communities, and I'm not...

    I need to put my thoughts together because I'm to give a talk on this at the end of the month at the National Native Seed Conference online. Nice. And I've got like five minutes, it's a lightning talk. So I want to just have some real. Yeah, I got some real, I got to crystallize it down to some really clear points. But a couple of the papers I looked at found evidence that the hemiparasites do reduce the biomass, the total biomass in the area where they're living. So they're suppressing the.

    the biomass of the host plants that they're taking nutrient from. And they may also increase the evenness. So there's like two measures of diversity. There's like the number of species that are there, and there's how evenly represented they are in the community. ratios. they may not, the hemiparasites may not increase the species diversity so much, but they can influence the evenness.

    And then another thing that a couple of papers mentioned is that they saw an increase in the Floristic Quality Index or the FQI, which is a measure of

    The...

    Laura Walter (45:35.478)

    I mean, just is all these terms. How many, you know, the proportion of the community that's made up of these conservative species, the ones that are more typical of a...

    healthy, ancient, grassland community, So, or more, yeah, yeah, I think that's, that's reasonable.

    like a mature-

    Kent Boucher (45:56.782)

    Are there any visible, I mean, obviously you just described some visible things at a macro level, but if, well, first of all, what plants are these hemiparasite, I mean, is any perennial plant fair game for a hemiparasite to live off of as a host, or do they more commonly go after grasses or legumes or some kind of trend like that?

    You look like you're watching a tennis match.

    I kept expecting him to wind it down the question, which it was a great question. And so I'd look over to Laura.

    It's okay, balls in my court now.

    You heard me say parasite, he kept turning his head. I don't know why.

    Laura Walter (46:40.66)

    what that means. But yeah, that's also such a wonderful question. I think a lot of times

    These hemi parasites, at least the pedicularis species will use grass hosts and sedge hosts, but they are also thought to use plants in the aster family, sometimes even in the rose family like strawberry and legumes. So they're pretty broad in their hosts.

    Are there any visible symptoms when a plant's being

    Parasitized? Parasitized? Yeah, they're They're weakened? Yeah, they're weakened, yeah. So we've grown both species of pedicularis that we've worked with, the lanculata and the canadensis. We've grown them with, in the case of the lanculata, it was two wetland sedge species. And I do see signs of suppressed growth in the patch where there's the densest growth of pedicularis lanculata, even the...

    Carix hysterosina, is a pretty, it's percupine sedge. It's a pretty vigorous bunchy sedge with really broad leaves. It's suppressed and visibly so. I haven't measured that. So I'm hesitant to say anything definitive about that because I haven't really done research on it. I've just made observations in the field.

    Nicolas Lirio (48:02.176)

    And isn't research just like observations written down?

    Talk to Justin about that.

    Oh my goodness. Just wait.

    I'm just kidding because I'm talking to someone who like does horrible research

    Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, and with statistics, know, with replication and randomization and all the things. so, but the other observation that I've made is I grew a bunch of, this particular is Canadensis, had poor germination the first year, saved some seedling flats and some host plugs that I'd seeded into, saved them over winter.

    Laura Walter (48:42.454)

    and got more seedlings than I expected. So I ended up, you know, planting this with a couple of different hosts, just stuff that I had, that I was growing for other reasons and I had extras of. So I ended up with the, this is, the common names are confusing because it's either Canadian lousewort or wood betany. But anyway, that's particular is candidensis. Growing it with.

    It's the only, from my understanding, it's like the only somewhat readily available hemiparasite. It's the only one that I can consistently go and get from somewhere. yeah, yeah, you're right. But I'm thinking just lousewort in general is about the only thing that you can consistently get. And I don't know if it's cause it is, it grows a lot. You know, it has a wider range of favorable conditions. I don't know, but it.

    Yeah.

    If I'm putting a hemiparasite in, that's about the only one that you can...

    Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if those are being wild collected or if somebody's got them in a production situation and they just haven't told people how they're doing it. Now I've got them in a production situation and I'm telling people how to do it. So far we have, and I should talk about the native seed production manual, but I'll.

    Nicolas Lirio (49:56.856)

    I Price would say that there's machines involved.

    The price that Justin came up with for Canadensis most recently was $1,125 per pound.

    But he's and he's probably getting an eco type, right?

    No, he's putting out a bid to get any of it. so he's gotten, I think each year he gets like three to four bids for that species and the mean that he has calculated for that is $1,100 a pound. Lancyolata is like in the 200, 250 range.

    any of it.

    Nicolas Lirio (50:35.554)

    Okay, yeah, that might be well, yeah, I think that's what I'm.

    And swamp lawsuit is really productive. mean, we have a little plot. our plot is like 1100, square feet total. And, we got six and a half pounds off it the second year, which was the first year that it produced a lot of seed. then, it sustained production. This, we were getting another five and a half pounds off it. And I don't think I was as careful in the harvest.

    Is it as wet as it says it should be? Like swamp milkweed can handle wet, it seems to like masoch as much as it likes wet.

    I haven't tried growing it without irrigation. So I have it under irrigation, just drip irrigation. Yeah.

    Yeah. Well, I'm that's interesting because most wet species that are readily available have unbelievable seed count and seed production per square foot or per acre or whatever, you know, square stem monkey flower seed box, blue vervein.

    Laura Walter (51:30.446)

    Oh, Blue Vervein is nuts. It's unbelievable. I have like one little plot and it produced 30 pounds. Oh yeah. And it's so easy to harvest and clean. mean, if everything were like that, man, we'd be just happy people all the time.

    It is the singular species we have ever planted and gotten harvest off the same year. We had to start in plugs.

    It almost acts like an annual though. I mean, the next year.

    We could have technically done that with some SOG this last year.

    Yeah, we had a really strong SOG first year feel that guy was a almost knee high.

    Kent Boucher (51:59.195)

    I that was the last field Carol planted.

    You're talking Bulu-Curdapengela?

    Yes. Yeah.

    I love how you say SOG and it's kind of like, it's a celebrity nickname.

    Yeah, yeah, well when I first because dad was called SOG and so I started going around to these companies like yeah You guys got any SOG and one dude was like look, dude. I don't know what SOG is. Sorry, I don't you know one of the most popular

    Kent Boucher (52:22.09)

    spells it out e s s

    You

    You guys, this is like we're going, we're veering off again. I want to go back and we got to finish the Pediculars Canadensis before we move ahead. Yeah. Lousewort. Lousewort. Okay. So we have this Pediculars Canadensis in this plot because of just extenuating circumstances, I've got it with some warm season grasses, I've got it with some sedges, which are cool season, right? Pediculars Canadensis comes up early in the spring.

    Okay, last

    Laura Walter (52:50.762)

    It's one of those things that flowers in like late April to early May, the queen bumblebees are coming up there, they're pollinates it. And you've got seed by end of May, early June. The stuff with the sedge that grows vigorously early in the season was beautiful. Had, you know, like formed kind of big patches and had lots of stems with flowers and produced quite a bit of seed.

    The stuff that was in the patch that had the warm season grasses was little and skinny and maybe produced like one flowering stock. But by the midsummer, you know how last year we had a lot of rains early in the season and then it got hot and dry? By the middle of the summer, the stuff with the sedges, the sedges were very suppressed. Like this gets back to your earlier question. you see a difference if they were close to one of these big patches of the lousewort? They were like, the sedges looked like, this is too much, you know?

    And by midsummer those those love sport looked really stressed They were their leaves were wilting and curling and I was like am I gonna lose this plot and I really want to have it next year because I didn't get much seed off it this year because I missed the window a Few days I think okay. Yeah, because I think once those capsules open the the Canada love sort sheds its seed real quickly the The swamp love sports more forgiving, but anyway, so I missed the windows. I really want this plot to survive

    How big's that window?

    Laura Walter (54:15.756)

    the stuff with the warm season grasses seemed like it weathered the summer a lot better. So now I'm thinking when you think about the biology of these plants and that they're kind of generalist in their ability to form these root connections and get nutrients from different plants, maybe what we need to, for growing these in agronomic production, maybe we need a mixed host planting to support them the best. So I'm thinking of throwing a legume in there too.

    That's a point.

    beginning to end how you establish something that is so precarious and it's living conditions. Well, it needs another plant to live. But how would you, how do you, how do you get them? So the plants are already out there and you just spread the seed.

    Why is it?

    Laura Walter (54:55.842)

    Yeah, it's not that hard.

    Laura Walter (55:01.73)

    That's one way to do it. Okay. And some people have been successful with that, but I don't know of many cases where they recorded what was the area that they seeded and how much seed did they apply? think there's like one paper I found that's not published in a standard journal, but it's out there. But what we did was based on something that there's a blog that's called the Grassland Restoration Network.

    Okay. Have you encountered that? They have like meetings and things like that too.

    Is that this? No, maybe. I've been on a lot of Prairie websites. I was thinking of Prairie restoration. Yeah, yeah, I think.

    This is a Grassland Restoration Network. You should get on this and follow their blog. It's interesting. There's a lot of good info on there. And there was a contributor there named Luke Dahlberg. D-A-H-L-B-E-R-G. So is this a blog? So it's, they're articles, you know. Okay.

    like a forum or it's just

    Nicolas Lirio (56:02.09)

    And you have to submit a blog. OK, OK, I see.

    Yeah, and Luke submitted two blogs, I think in 2023, on his experiences with trying to grow particularis lansylata and particularis canadensis. And I'm like, this is so cool, because I had just collected these from the wild and I was trying to grow them. So I looked at his blog posts and I thought, you know what, maybe we could try something similar here. So I started, started Sedgehosts about a month before I knew that the particularis seed was going to be coming out of stratification.

    And so we got those little baby sedge plants established part way. And then at the base of those plants, we made a little tiny divot with a chopstick. And then we put two seeds of a particularis at the base of each of those little sedges. We did that hundreds of times, but it was easier than you think because I mentioned my husband, Michael, the one who thinks you're brothers, right? And he's...

    He did that hundreds of times.

    Nicolas Lirio (57:03.31)

    The looks, dude, it's gotta be.

    It is, this is totally. He works at the university and does microbiology. And so he has these little things called plastic pipettes. And they just have like a little bulb on one and you squeeze them. What we found was if we put the particular seed that we'd stratified, if we put it in a little cup and added some water, it was really easy to suck up the seed and you could count it because the plastic pipette is clear. So you could suck up two, three seeds at a time and just.

    And then you're squirted with the base of the plant and you're done. So it was super quick.

    Yeah, that does. That sounds like science, you know, just sitting at a table. I feel like you could just watch TV and just do that, you know. yeah, that's right. That's not good for your health. I So how are you stratifying? We always use sand like wet sand, but how is that what you get the sand out of the.

    I listen to podcasts.

    Laura Walter (57:53.704)

    That's what we did. that was just when you put it in the little cup and you swish it around, the seed just kind of, you know, it sort of separates by density and the seed is just there on top of the sand and you just suck it up in the water and then you squirt it in the thing. And we got great establishment of the little pediculars lancelata in their sedge house the first year.

    Okay. So that's, had, I had that question as well. The sedges weren't mature by any means and they were still the last word could, could use it, a very small immature plant and the small carrots didn't die.

    The small carrots didn't die. fact, we used two different species, bebsedge and parcupine's edge. And the bebsedge actually grew a little bit too fast. It has real fine foliage and it like shaded out some of the lousewort plants before we realized what was happening. And then we started giving them haircuts.

    I remember we came in. I think we came in once and you're like, we had given all these haircuts. Which is like scissors.

    Yeah, we just went out and mowed the grass with a pair of scissors. Yeah, that was not fun, but blisters aside. So that worked really well for that particular slancyleidae. That's really not a hard species to grow in a production situation. Once you get those plugs and they transplanted beautifully out to the field, we've got drip irrigation on them, it's fine.

    Nicolas Lirio (59:08.366)

    How would you have harvested it or how did you harvest it and you missed the window? You missed the window on accident. You were gone for the weekend.

    I did not miss the window on the lancelata. The swamp last one, we were fine. And that one holds its seed a little bit better. It was on the canadensis, which is the higher stakes one. It's more valuable seed. It's a low growing or spring flowering. know, it's yeah.

    Yeah, man, those, especially the spring shady species, right? So people call us and they go, hey, I want something for shade and mostly are full all shade. And I will explain to them that is very difficult to do. And here's why. And I explain if something grows in shade, then you can't then it's used to being near trees or, or, and you have to mimic the shade, take structure. Structure means no combine. That means hands and knees. So

    We're mostly relying on handpickers in Driftless Iowa or Northern Missouri or something to handpick these species.

    And they oftentimes have a very short window where they're releasing that seed. a lot of them are ant dispersed and they have little structures on them that are attractive to the ants and the ants pick them up and carry them away. So you have.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:00:20.044)

    yeah. But you know, I mean, like Mayaf and wild geranium and any kind of flocks and just their.

    yeah, the flocks

    Yeah, the jewel. And well, and and so not only that, but if someone knows where to get these prairie plants and they have the expertise of when to harvest them, that person should get paid very well. You know, they just they just that is an expertise that is very hard to come by. And then let's say then they add them up. I mean, there's some of those species. I know blue eyed grass isn't technically in that category, but it's similar to this and that.

    That's right, yeah.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:00:58.542)

    You can hand pick a million plants. You're going to only get a thimble of seed. Yeah. And plus that person needs to make an average of a good wage per hour that they're out there. So you add all of that up and then all of a sudden it's like four thousand dollars, you know, pound. That's not a stretch at all. but so with the hand, the hand picking or some of these things that lose their seed just within 12 hours, you know, 48 hours.

    We should pay some and I'm not making Kent and I have no time for handpicking. We do not make any money off of handpicking. We spend a lot of money every year on people who have done handpicking and I am just grateful that they went and got it. And I'm grateful that there are people out there that are willing to spend the money on the shady species. But usually when someone says, I want an all shade mix. And then I show them the price of $3,500 per acre. They go, well, you know, and then they put Fescue down and it's like,

    Yeah

    Nicolas Lirio (01:01:56.972)

    They might not even have the money, you know, so like, what do do with that? You know, I don't know. I, I wrestle with the shady species is hard and I'm worried that half of them are going extinct.

    Here's my suggestion, my imperfect solution, but my suggestion, go out and hand pick your own. They're one of the easiest things to identify, especially like those early spring ephemerals like blue fox. It's the only thing in bloom in the woods, or like trout lily or. Yeah, yeah. Well, but mean, if you grab a handful of seed and just start storing up some seeds to get in your refrigerator until you got.

    Then you gotta figure out how to grow them.

    Kent Boucher (01:02:34.346)

    a handful of throw down in your yard where you want, not for production, but just like, want to fill this in with some shade tolerant species.

    There's more grasses and sedges available that are shade. Yeah.

    Or you could even maybe, you know, take a little spade with you and transplant. You don't like that?

    Please don't. Please don't. Please don't go out into a remnant ecosystem.

    Well, what about like if you own like your own timber or something like that and you're just moving to a different spot on the property?

    Laura Walter (01:03:01.934)

    I suppose that, yeah, but I just. mean there's certain things like.

    I go to I-

    public land.

    I think that's actually illegal.

    Yeah.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:03:14.542)

    I think it is illegal to pick seed unless you have permission from the governing authority.

    Yeah, you want to know, I got a depressing story.

    about that. Some counties are very restrictive in their seed collection guidelines as they should be. mean, there are times where, you know, folks have come through as seed collectors and have been unscrupulous or have just, you know, picked every last seed out of a place. But if you're going back to that person who wants to establish some things in their, you know, in their yard or something. Yeah, I would I would encourage.

    some hand collection of seed, especially if they own the property or they have permission to collect the seed. But with a lot of those things, you're more successful if you start with fresh seed than if you store it that sometimes it doesn't kill the seed to store it, but it may go into a deeper dormancy and take longer to germinate.

    Interesting, I didn't know that. So I wanted to ask you about this. You got a seed, I think it was a wild rye, think it hairy wild rye, and it was like 12 years old. And then you test the germ, 92%. What the heck? What is perfect? How do you do that? That's crazy.

    Laura Walter (01:04:24.702)

    It's, well, seed storage is important and the two things to remember are that the enemies of seed are warmth and moisture. mean, those are things you want when you're germinating a lot of seed, not every seed, but I mean, moisture is important of course. But when you want to store seed and prevent it from germinating over a long time, but remain viable, you want it to be cool and dry. And so we keep ours in a-

    For kind of medium term storage, we keep ours in a walk-in cooler that is at about refrigerator temperature.

    What is medium term storage like a year or five years?

    A lot of people would say like one to five years, but like with some species, we've had things in there, especially like the legumes that they'll remain viable for 20 years plus.

    Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    Laura Walter (01:05:15.842)

    But other things that they go downhill faster. think that's one of the things where information sharing is so important and it would be great to know more about the viability of seed and storage. there are, the rules of thumb don't work.

    yeah, cause every species is like sky blue aster. We have to sell it on the first test because the next test it'll have half its term. And that's tough because honestly I don't even like selling it the next fall. don't like, I like getting rid of all of it in the spring and getting it on people's land because, and I think asters just do that. They just put out crappier quality. It just for exchange for insane quantity of seed production.

    Right.

    Laura Walter (01:06:00.746)

    Yeah, they're interesting. I've got some thoughts about that, but we could...

    I don't know where my brain just went.

    So, so when you put it in a freezer.

    Well, that's thank you that was exactly where I wanted to go. Oh cool. So we have When we start our seed the the first generation is started from seed that was collected from remnant ecosystems from remnant prairies that were Unplowed might have been used for grazing or haying but these are Old cemeteries. These are ancient ecosystems. So our first generation has grown from that and

    when we have that first generation seed, we'll release that to native seed growers, but we reserve a sample of that and put that in a freezer at negative 20 Celsius. So we've got it in a deep freeze and in an airtight container. And then when, you know, like those aster seeds don't last very long in storage. we'll go and there's a rule of thumb for you aster. And that one.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:06:50.434)

    Wow.

    Laura Walter (01:07:11.106)

    We don't like cleaning. I hate cleaning don't like storing them. it's terrible. Anyway, so- But they're awesome plants. But then we store a sample of that seed, like an ounce of seed, if it's a small seeded species like that, in our freezer. And we can go back to that generation one seed. So when we need fresh seed for our walk-in cooler, I don't have to go back to all those remnant prairies. I don't have the time or the budget to do all that travel. And so we can go back to our generation one seed and we can start a generation two plot.

    And we have enough of that seed in that generation one freezer and it lasts long enough that we can keep doing that multiple

    Would you ever do paid storage? We have no freezer. We work with refrigeration or cooling, but freezing is not.

    I'll show you my freezers and you'll see what my answer would be. They're packed.

    Yeah. I want, mean, I also.

    Kent Boucher (01:08:00.846)

    Do ever have to do like a real deep dive to the bottom of the freezer?

    I mean we have things in bins and they're labeled and stuff like that but it's still

    What do think the oldest thing is that you guys, that's been collected that you guys would have in the?

    my gosh, there's collections. Well, so we also have a freezer in which we store the collections that were made in the remnant prairies. this is like, it's our small barred, you know, our vault. And Laura Jackson likes to joke that if there were a fire in the building, first we roll out the remnant seed bank. It's only a little bit, there's a kernel of truth in that. But yeah, in there, there are collections that,

    Is this called permafrost or?

    Nicolas Lirio (01:08:29.047)

    Yeah

    Laura Walter (01:08:40.03)

    Gosh, I should go into the database and see if any were made before 1990, but the program was initiated in 1990. So I think the oldest collections are in there are there. There's probably 3,500 samples in there. Yeah. Wow. And some of it were used up, you know, in producing the first generation field. But do I think any of them was?

    there's still some of those left

    Nicolas Lirio (01:08:54.307)

    the event

    Nicolas Lirio (01:09:01.163)

    I'm wondering like, do you have any 25 year old species? think their germs still perfectly good?

    Oh gosh. A few years ago, I found out that we didn't have any reserved seed of Dahlia candida, the white prairie clover. So I went back into that remnant seed bank and the germination of that stuff was uniformly over 90%. And that seed was 20 plus years old.

    Wow.

    Why is white prairie clover more expensive than purple prairie clover? We've never grown white prairie clover. We've grown a lot of purple prairie clover. because my understanding, I think they harvest it the same way. mean, it's very similar seed. My only guess is that just per acre, it's consistently a percentage lower than purple prairie clover. Yeah, I don't know. Interesting. didn't know if you knew from the growing production.

    I want to ask some questions about stratification a little bit because

    Laura Walter (01:09:53.204)

    You just interrupted Nicholas. don't think you-

    Yeah,

    have to. Remember my comment about him walking into the gas station early?

    I have I had coffee. All right. But I want to ask my one other question first that involves that. OK, would worry. And maybe this isn't a concern at all. We deal with like little small 500 square foot packets of seed or we might custom mix a quarter acre seed. If I stored something in a freezer and then pulled it out and that was let's say it was five percent of that mix, which would be really high, you know, but maybe mass wise, it might be five percent of the mix.

    I'm concerned about condensation being in a little plastic bag, sitting warm from us onto UPS, sitting on their shelf for two weeks before they actually get it planted. I'm worried that it would like germinate some of that stuff. Is that a concern?

    Laura Walter (01:10:45.794)

    So you have it in a, like, what is this, like a four mil blast exit block?

    This isn't a real thing we're doing right now.

    No, no, we don't. don't put anything in the freezer. if we did store something in the freezer, I would be worried about condensation causing it to germ.

    Where does the condensation form?

    I don't know. I've seen it form on the inside of bags. Yes, okay, yeah, yeah. Yep, I have seen it on the inside of bags.

    Laura Walter (01:11:04.568)

    You have.

    So you had some moisture in there to begin with, I suppose. Yeah. So that would be my concern is if, know.

    It didn't just spontaneously water it and just all of sudden...

    Very funny. But yeah, most of the time, you know, like if I'm moving stuff in and out of the freezer and it's in an airtight container, I'd let it come to room temperature before I, you know, I open those bags to. Right. mean, I suppose if you're seeing, if you can actually see condensation on the inside of a bag, then maybe the moisture content was a little high when it went in.

    So airtight is kind of the key there.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:11:40.568)

    Do you ever, do you have like a seal vac? Would that, would that kind of eliminate that problem?

    I don't.

    Maybe so.

    Laura Walter (01:11:54.306)

    He does that.

    Laura Walter (01:11:58.584)

    See ya

    Well, so I mean, they do. mean, with food, you know, can happen and then I'll jump over to you, can't.

    Start looking that stuff up, you'll be on all kinds of lists on the web.

    Yeah, that's true. How to see. Yeah.

    Hahaha!

    Nicolas Lirio (01:12:13.474)

    What you're trying to do what to stay away from what and because we have that hairy wild dry, right? And we planted an acre of it and wild dry famous for lasting three years. Now you said hairy wild dries is a little different than Canada and Virginia.

    I've had really good success of Virginia staying viable for many years in the cooler here.

    no, not viability of seed. I'm talking about the in the field.

    in the field. yeah. Canada is just declined like crazy. You get your best yields in the first.

    I mean, I also have a theory about secondary successional. You have your early successional and then I think you have secondary successional and then you have your higher cause anyway. But well, we have, we just have two buckets. I think there's closer to three. I know. Yeah. So, what we want to do is keep back, you know, so odd pounds of this first field of hairy or silky wild dry and then plant.

    Kent Boucher (01:12:55.096)

    tertiary.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:13:13.77)

    as many subsequent fields as the what? Velocis?

    vallus vulisus.

    Yeah, think it's veloces or velocesaur.

    You know what's upsetting is how many elements there are that aren't called wild rye. That like upsets me. I think if they should just all be called a wild rye, you know, like bottle brush. So.

    Well, they just moved that over into the LMS genus a little while ago. was. really? didn't know that. Yeah, it was. God.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:13:41.644)

    I'm new to the Prairie World. I'm new to the scientific names. And so the idea would be we could keep this first yield, this first field's yield, you know, for long time. Cause if every two years you're turning over your field and you're getting seed from that, you, you start getting genetics really far down that are kind of a ways away.

    Yeah, you basically start doing selection for your growing.

    Yes. so will the plants die out or is it basically if someone's soil doesn't match ours, it won't do nearly as well. Like what is the, what is the con of pulling seed off of a new field and planting a new field and then pulling seed, you know,

    multiple generations over time is well, each time that you replant, then you're planting, you know, a subset of that population. So,

    you're narrowing potentially the gene pool each time. And also the plants that are most well suited to your particular soils and situation may have higher reproductive output. So maybe those are better represented in subsequent generations. But I think the primary thing would just be kind of that progressive narrowing of the gene pool.

    Laura Walter (01:14:57.9)

    And that could be not just due to the growing situations, but how you harvest the stuff, how you germinate it, all of those conditions are potential cases where you could be doing some unintentional selection. Maybe it makes it easier to harvest and clean the seeds, so maybe there could be some intentionality in that. So what you're doing then, you're narrowing that gene pool is also you're potentially narrowing the...

    interesting

    Laura Walter (01:15:25.784)

    kind of the traits of those plants or functional traits and then you put them out in the landscape, are they going to be as good at, will that population be as genetically diverse and as able to adjust to different growing conditions and changes over time?

    don't know. Fascinating. Yeah, the diversity is super important. Also, by the way, we gotta be wrapped up by probably 12. Are you kidding? We have probably 30 minutes. Wait, Ken's got a question.

    Okay, okay, so

    It could just go on too long, stratification, there again, we set it as rules, biology, chemistry is worse, but biology rarely fits into perfect boxes. And so we say like, that needs 10 days of stratification. That needs 180 days with 60 of...

    you know, warmth or 60 of cold, 60 of warm and 60 of cold again. Now we have all these different, you know, we call them what? Germination codes or something like that. I think it even says that on the- There's the famous UNI periodic table of prairie. But we have, yeah, Prairie Moon has that as well.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:16:45.198)

    Is that just their own experience?

    I think you know what that's a good question. I think that you need to interview them and have

    Well, we've tried, we've tried. They won't come on. So we bought seed from them. They do a great job.

    So my question back to you is how do we know those things? if you look at any given species, look up, you know, get on Google Scholar and look for published information about how to germinate those things. You'll probably run into some germination studies by a team of scientists known as Baskin and Baskin. Okay. And they- For the age Leave their husband and wife.

    I didn't know if it was like the cousins to Baskin and Robin. That's what I was thinking.

    Laura Walter (01:17:27.118)

    I don't know them personally, they have written like the tome. This thing weighs as much as a cinder block and it's called seeds, period. That's awesome. You'll come across publications by them most frequently where they'll have tested different germination conditions and they will say, is the one that works.

    But I think a lot of times what happens is somebody tries something and it works and they put up a propagation protocol on the, it's the ranger website, RNGR. There's a propagation. my goodness, you gotta know about this site. If you type in RNGR propagation protocols, you'll find this site. Native Plants Journal publishes a lot of this stuff too. But I think there is,

    just not enough information to say that one thing is like, this is the way to germinate this species. mean, some of them we were pretty, there's a lot of folks who've worked with them and.

    What's interesting to me about it is a prairie that's planted because so many species it's recommended that you have a period of cold stratification. Prairies, so much of it is around the CRP guidelines and things. the time of year you got to plant.

    I'm gonna stop you right here. I'm gonna say, hold that question for Justin. Because I think you're going into the realm of what you're gonna do with the seed mix that goes out in November versus June for an extreme example.

    Kent Boucher (01:19:06.338)

    for a piece.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:19:11.342)

    June is extreme. man, tell July's extreme. I tell people first week or two of June. Well, and it depends on how far south you get in Missouri. That's much too late, but anyway.

    Bye.

    Laura Walter (01:19:21.894)

    and then when you get to those germination code thought is then there's population to population differences in plants as well. So a lot of times it's related to latitude.

    Yowza.

    Kent Boucher (01:19:34.318)

    Is it good enough to, I know you did some, you presented some findings that you had a couple of years ago at the stakeholders meeting, might've been back in 2023, with where you had stored some seed. You did some like, you know, and you're very controlled, goes into the refrigerator, I think, if I'm remembering this correctly, and then you had some that you like stored outside and...

    and you let them more naturally stratify and then you compare the results afterwards. Do you remember something about this or am I inventing something?

    Well, I tend to, sometimes when I'm trying to germinate something it's difficult, I'll subject it to different conditions and see what works better. that's not saying that I have done a fully replicated study where I have all these different trials.

    I didn't sense that it was this like super, you know, like published research. was just like, Hey, this is just something I noticed.

    Well, and the particularis, going back to that one, that particularis canadensis, I said the particularis lancilata is pretty easy to grow. The particularis canadensis, I had dried seed that I'd collected most of it that year. I think I'd gotten some collections from some other people that might've been before then. And I subjected it to warm and then cold stratification. And then I seeded the plugs and some germ flats and got basically nothing to come up. But then.

    Laura Walter (01:20:55.768)

    kept all of those flats, the plugs with the host in them, the germ flats where it was just the particular seed kept all that stuff, kept it in an unheated shed over the winter. So it got a second round of cold stratification and the next April it came up gangbusters.

    What are you doing to warm stratification? just leave it out in the summer and like a-

    leave it in just like my office or something. Like 22 degrees Celsius is a typical room temperature. No, it's moist. can I get my book first? This was my Christmas present from my son Oscar a couple years ago. It's called The Light Eaters. It's a book by Zoe Schlanger and it is a book about the intelligence of plants.

    Just dry, dry conditions for the seat. You get a little moist.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:21:36.237)

    book.

    Laura Walter (01:21:49.952)

    And it's a really interesting kind of, the whole thing is like this lengthy argument about what intelligence means and how organisms sense and respond to their environment. And that plants have, you they don't have eyeballs and ears and a central nervous system, but that they have means of sensing and responding to the world. And there was a page in here that I just, I read before bed and this almost made me like wake up and not be able to sleep.

    because she cites a research paper from 2017 from researchers looking at Arabidopsis, which is like the lab rat of plants. Okay. And they were looking at what kind of controls the plants decision making on when to germinate. my ears are perked up, right? And what they found was that there was a cluster of cells in the little embryonic root tip that

    respond to changes in temperature and that this little group of cells like integrates these temperature signals and over time flips from producing a hormone that inhibits germination to one that stimulates germination. But it's like the combined action of a cluster of cells integrating multiple signals from the environment that finally tell that seed it's time to produce a root and break out of here.

    And that got me curious, if when we're stratifying seed and we've just got it in the fridge for 60 days, that's kind of like the most common one you see is like, keep it cold for 60 days in wet sand and it'll grow. If we've got things that we're having trouble with in those consistent conditions, what if we gave them some variability that would help that, if they've got that kind of a decision-making center, like the Arabidopsis does, if they do, then maybe, you know.

    those fluctuating temperatures would cause their switch to get flipped.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:23:50.86)

    So not warm enough to germinate, but fluctuation and how cold it is and then have it warm.

    Warm up. So what I tried, so of course I read something in a book and it's written by a journalist and she's done her research and it's good, but of course I want to immediately apply it. And I had just gotten a call from another grower who said that they were asked to grow out some sprangle sedge, longbeak sedge, and that they had tried everything. They'd thrown the book at the seed and it just wouldn't come up. And they're like, Laura, do you know how to grow the seed? And I'm like, hmm, I just read this book.

    Anyway, so, so last year I had some, some seed that I'd collected from some plants I had in my garden for, of, of Carrick spring Eli, which I love. It's a beautiful plant. you have a, it's sprangle sedge or longbeak sedge. my gosh. So you're people who want stuff to grow in the shade. It's a gorgeous plant and, it, it flowers at the same time as bluebells. anyway, so I had some, some seed that I grew in my yard. I didn't have very much. divided it into three piles and one of the bags.

    of stratified seed, I would bring it to my office three times a week for eight hours. Okay. So it was in the fridge the rest of the time, but I gave it eight hours, three times a week of room temperature. When I then put all those seeds in their germ boxes, I got higher and more rapid and more even germination in the ones that had the variable temperature. So thank you very much, Zoe Schlanger for your book. That's really interesting. it really works. So now I'm like,

    Wow

    Laura Walter (01:25:24.748)

    Maybe I'll try that with a few more things. I've got, these are Carrick Springelia that I've just got in moist sand here. And then I've got a bunch of other things that I'm growing either for the plots or for urban prairie. And like this one right here is another Carrick species. This is Carrick's Blanda. And this is gonna be a new one for the program. So I've got this one from multiple prairies across Northern Iowa and I'm really hoping that it does well.

    It's one that takes a variety of sun conditions and is a short growing thing. think it's kind of almost evergreen. Such a beautiful little plant. The funny thing is it's a weed in my lawn. KEM Lawn has told me multiple times they can get rid of it for me and I'm like, go away, leave me alone. I like my weeds. But yeah, so these are my ones this year. I call it taking my seeds for a walk. I go and get them from the fridge, walk them back to the building, hang out with them for a while.

    I'm not saying that talking to them helps playing music, whatever.

    You kind of hypothesized a way to agitate those cells that you read about. Just kind of like get their attention almost. Yeah. Shake them awake.

    Kinda. That's right.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:26:37.742)

    That's that mimics more closely the spring of hey, it's kind of warm. It's almost up. Nope. Just kidding. Got really cold again.

    Exactly. So you don't want to be that seed that's like the first time that it gets warm, you germinate. You want to be that seed that waits until, you know, how many fluctuations.

    And that's always been a fear of mine because every year we get one or two people that'll call in and be like, it'll be, I don't know, what? Late September, early October. I'm just going to go ahead and play it now. some, I mean, there's just people that just get away with murder. You know I mean? They slime out everything.

    Please do not do that.

    Laura Walter (01:27:17.144)

    It turns out just fine.

    at the wrong time is equal to murder and gets mine.

    Well, you know, I'm just saying that my dad always called it sliming out. Like, you really were not supposed to have that workout in your favor, but somehow you-

    All those poor little seeds.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:27:32.468)

    You are high school teacher. Those kids exist.

    yeah, they pull it out.

    man, mean, the number of times I've slimed out of things, guess.

    Larry

    Yeah

    Nicolas Lirio (01:27:44.96)

    out of that one. It's like a federal sentencing.

    Bye.

    I always fear that, you know, you'll have the, they'll go and plant the seed and then it'll have this, you know, quick germination and then, you know, boom, killing frost for the seedlings. But maybe for some, maybe, but there might be some species that, yeah, that's just a little, that first little bit of fluctuation and then goes right back into dormancy over winter.

    I don't know. Well, I guess my concern is if we did that, you know, we'd accidentally germinate some of the stuff, I guess it's not going to. It's not going to warm up to 78 degrees in eight hours. Well, what?

    Well, and soil temp doesn't doesn't fluctuate near as. Yeah, as air temp does.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:28:36.154)

    That's true. Man, that is interesting. Are you the first person to do hard experiments with this?

    I'm not doing hard experiments, I'm just throwing some seed in there. I've got some different bags in their label. There's some replication. I've counted seeds. There's going to be some information that can come out of it.

    You're just taking it

    Nicolas Lirio (01:28:58.238)

    Are you reading someone else's journal kind of following along with this stuff or you're just kind of throwing stuff to the wind?

    The light eater is just inspired.

    This has just inspired me. Yeah. So I haven't dug into the, you know, to see if anybody's done a lot with it before. I'm just trying it out.

    There's some species that, especially if they have that really long, we'll go back to the term, that prairie moon term, germination code, like the spider warts, anemone. Sometimes it seems like those things are never going to germinate. And maybe that's just something that we need to play around with in a more controlled setting and plug trade.

    Yeah.

    Laura Walter (01:29:42.894)

    Wouldn't it be great if we had an extension service that could do this?

    What do think it would, what do you, well, you probably aren't seeing the cost side. Like I don't feel like it'd be that much money per year to have an extension, to have an extension that was 15 humans that were doing, you know, some of these harder experiments.

    We're gonna get a, what do they call it? We're gonna get a Prairie Checkoff program established.

    yeah, accidentally create a big ag prairie.

    That's funny.

    Kent Boucher (01:30:19.822)

    Somebody will build a prairie adventure land that they charge people, you know, $25 a ticket to go in and see.

    and yet so many, you know, the prairie experiences are out there to be had for free.

    Yeah, those are.

    That's just what happened with the dairy checkoff program is basically that exact thing. Yeah, they used the checkoff money to create a, you know, a tourist place to come see how dairy production happens and then charge admission to.

    they created like a.

    Laura Walter (01:30:47.918)

    my goodness.

    Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    The book Barons by Austin Frerich makes its appearance once again.

    180 pages maybe and big, big font.

    If you listen while you're working, it's like a six hour listening on.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:31:03.212)

    But it's not like, and I like Austin a lot, so I'm not saying anything about him. You don't feel better after reading the book.

    It's not uplifting. you, it gets you like kind of grumpy.

    Yeah, Ken's anger level just on average is a little higher since reading that book. He's like aged by 15 years. Yeah.

    I just, there's a lot of injustices that go.

    You know, I'm having this thought listening to Laura. It's kind of interesting. There are cultures that produce scientists, researchers, inventors, and they actually don't have that far off. And Benjamin Franklin, when asked about his business mind versus his research mind, he was like, it is the same mind, you know, and I use this

    Kent Boucher (01:31:28.621)

    was

    Nicolas Lirio (01:31:54.198)

    I don't switch kind of back and forth that the same mind that goes into both things. I wonder if in the U S we've just out of culture driven the larger percentage of people who would run with their curiosities and research for like the betterment of research into like economic growth.

    Okay. Yeah. I'm going to deflect this conversation because I have opinions, but I am not going to, I'm not going to say them in this particular form.

    Yeah. Do you, uh, I want, I almost emailed this to you like a month ago. Do you have any prairie species that you can't get, uh, prairie companies, uh, native seed producers to pick up? Did I say, do you have any prairie species seeds like available?

    that you would like to see become available on the market.

    Yeah, but like us or Alan Dan or shooting star, any of the other ones, we are just haven't been interested.

    Laura Walter (01:32:53.698)

    Man, I wish you would have asked me this question in an email beforehand so I could have looked through my list because I'm really terrible about coming up with lists on the fly. you're good.

    And the reason I ask is because there's a lot of people that I've sent your way, sorry. Your email's public, good knowledge. I sent them your way.

    Part of my job is sharing information. Yeah.

    And they ask us for information. And we wanna be able to share as much as we can. it's, mean, I just got another email yesterday, like just a person who's wanting to jump into Prairie and sit down and get coffee with me and chat. And I love that. just, my schedule six weeks booked out, like, but you know, to the T, it's just not gonna work.

    I just met with somebody recently, it's here in the area who's interested in getting into producing mostly plugs and some seeds. it was just so interesting to talk to her and see what her background was and how she's interested in diving into that. And I'd love to see more native plants available at local and regional levels from individual producers.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:33:58.36)

    That's what we talk about at Hoxie. Like you talk about your goals, right? It's really easy to be like, we want to be the biggest native seed, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we've talked about this a bunch on the team. We want to be a pillar in our region for native seed. One of the pillars, multiple pillars, right? And if there's a bunch of other pillars next to us and we're all able to, great.

    Well, that's the only way we're going to get prairie recovered at a significant level in the Midwest. know, someone, a friend of ours from Iowa Cover Crop made the point years ago, one of our first 20 episodes, probably the podcast, he said, if you wanted to restore prairie as much as it once was, and all of a sudden the program was put in place to do so, there wouldn't even be close to near enough seed stock.

    to achieve that. And I think it's important to keep that in mind. You know, not just be so focused on what is the size of the market now, but how we need each other to complete our overall goal, which is bring Prairie back in a significant way on the.

    At the same time, I think we could pat ourselves on the back a little bit. Yeah, Because if you look at the native seed market in a really much broader sense, the Midwestern US has- The Iowa. The availability of species and- Maybe the And that's sourced from remnant ecosystems is really quite good. It's quite an accomplishment. There's some good scientific papers that have come out on that.

    Yeah, I mean even the Southeast USA, they're doing a great job. Yeah. Southeastern Grasslands Institute is doing a great job. It's fantastic.

    Laura Walter (01:35:36.93)

    They're working on it.

    Laura Walter (01:35:41.868)

    and their local things in like Virginia and

    There's good company, like when people call and ask about seed down there, there are other good companies I can call and feel confident they're doing a good job. And that's just not the case with everywhere in the U.S. And then like the Amazon, like to be able to rebuild some of their force that I mean, good luck. of it's got to be eaten by a specific bird and pooped out.

    There's a lot of good stuff happening down there too. The Society for Ecological Restoration is a global organization and there's folks doing fantastic research and on the ground conservation in Brazil.

    Well, and I want our listeners who are interested in growing seed. A lot of people are interested in one growing seed and sometimes they're interested in selling it, helping people getting on the ground. Most of them aren't. They just want. And so they'll call us and say, hey, if I grow it, will you buy what I have? And I tell them, yes, if you let us have input in what you grow, because if you just pick the easiest things and I have to say, hey, I can get it here for $8 and you're having to charge 12 because of what it costs you to grow it.

    I got as makes sense, but if you let us have input on getting more diversity and stuff like that.

    Laura Walter (01:36:57.814)

    You asked me for a list. Okay, so there's some things. Yeah. So I'm going back. I'm glad to hear you talk about, you know, what, what, how you might work with other growers to get the, the, you wholesale to get the, the species that you need. You're not going to have. We can't do everything. Yeah. If somebody comes to you and says, I have a CRP full of big bluestem and it looks really great. You want my big bluestem? You're probably not, you're probably going to tell them, sorry, but we've got plenty of that. But if somebody's interested in getting started and growing some of these more rare things, like what I might talk about now, you, you'd

    Hit, that's it.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:37:12.845)

    and grow.

    Laura Walter (01:37:27.384)

    probably work with them.

    If we, yeah, yeah, absolutely. absolutely, but two, if we built out the mindset that eco type is important more than just us fringe freaks, you know, that are hanging out and say that you could, if that was built out more, I could take your big blue stem, but it's not. And so there are people who get contracts on BLM ground. not bashing on them, you know, and they're able to go and harvest that and their expenses are a lot lower. So they're selling big blue stem wholesale over three bucks. You know, we would most,

    zero input

    Yeah. And then, you know, by the time a broker gets it, we might see it on, the market for six or $7. I'm losing money.

    That's got to be from far away.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:38:09.876)

    Yeah, but you got to think most farmers putting in CRP don't care. They just, you know, whatever's cheaper.

    interesting.

    It's not all BLM. I think there's even state land. You can get harvest permits and stuff on. There's a seed producer in Missouri, not anymore. They're retired now, but he talked about how he used to be able to get some permits and land. can't remember if it was state land or if it was federal land, but.

    Okay, depends on the status.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:38:41.9)

    Yeah, public land, guess. BLM is like the they've got the biggest swaths of land up there. So the easiest example to kind of pick on. and I don't know much public land. So, you know, you're not going to go on Iowa public land and go and grab a bunch of, you know, 10,000 pounds of big blue. But yes, you're right. Back to your point. There are some species that are basically a commodity. And and so I don't want a beginner person getting into that spending.

    $80,000 on infrastructure to do it and then make a nickel or negative $2. I don't want them doing that. But what I think could be worth it is hanging out if they hung out with Laura and Laura said, hey, these were hard to grow, but they're kind of fringe species and you'll be able to sell them for more money. But it means you'll be on your hands and knees.

    They're not going able to compete.

    Laura Walter (01:39:31.374)

    Yeah. So maybe we can get somebody to grow that dicanthelium acuminatum, which is a really neat little, little, Tufti, native cool season graphs that could help fill some of those niches. it's one of your fairly early successional species, but it hangs out in, you'll find it in remnant prairies where there's a little bit of disturbance and tapered rosette grass, I think is the USDA one.

    common name, either?

    Laura Walter (01:40:01.358)

    Yeah, and it's the taxonomy is a little bit of a mess on the dicanthelium. So I'm going with a fairly broad designation. There are some people who divide, accumulate them into a whole bunch of different species, but I'm calling it just with, I'm going with the taxonomism.

    Laura, I'm not, whatever Laura's saying, I'm going.

    Oh my goodness. But yeah, so let's think about this. So that's one, I think those dicantheliums are, I've been told by like roadside managers, also Justin, that some of those, sorry, the native cool season grasses are a niche that we would like to have more options to fill. And so I've been trying to bring those on board. And so you know that native brome, bromas calmii,

    one that I like to sing a chorus about that every time I talk. This dicanthelium acuminatum is another one. We're trying to work out how to harvest dicanthelium libergii, which its common name is liberg's panic grass. So I'm sorry, it doesn't help.

    I a lot of requests for panic grasses. People will be like, oh, can I have some panic grasses in there?

    Laura Walter (01:41:12.382)

    They're probably talking about dicantheliums. Okay, that's what I wondered. Panicum is our switchgrass, the genus that switchgrass is in. The dicantheliums used to be lumped with switchgrass, so they used to be in the genus panicum, so they're also called panic grasses. So these are, but they're little guys. The reason they're called dicanthelium now is that it's, dyke means twice in anthelium flowering, so they're twice flowering, like I described about that.

    Like a top flowering seed production and a bottom one and the top one happens first,

    The top one happens first, right? And the top one, so with the Dicanthelium libergii this year, we actually were able to harvest that first by like just like setting the combine header just to like shave the top of the plot. And so we got that and then we kind of went through and gleaned out the remaining ones. And then I tried with the seed stripper later and that wasn't as effective, but we're working on that one. I don't have a stripper head for my combine. I have like a...

    stripper head was not use

    Nicolas Lirio (01:42:09.964)

    stripper.

    I have a seed stripper that's it's actually like a, it's got a head mounted on a weed whacker. With a rotating, like a rotating brush like head on a weed whacker that has a net that catches the seed. It didn't work as great, but I'm not the terribly skilled operator, so it could be that operator error. But yeah, those are important ones that that's a niche that just isn't very well occupied in our seed mixes yet I feel.

    And I've been working on a couple more grasses this year that will fit into that niche. One of them is a poa. If you know the genus poa, that's bluegrass, which sounds like an evil word because bluegrass is in radar prairies. But this one's called poa palustris or foul bluegrass or swamp meadow grass, I think is another name people use for it, which is pretty. And it is a pretty little grass that grows in wet prairies. We'll have that in production this year. And I think it's all signs are that it'll be successful. And then

    There's another native brome that I am bringing to the plots this coming year, and that's going to be fringed brome, which is, looks a lot like the Kalmsbrome, but it's taller, it's a wet prairie thing, and just a beautiful grass. So I'm trying to get people used to the idea that a brome can be a good thing if it's the right brome in the right place.

    How wet is wet?

    Laura Walter (01:43:36.238)

    pretty wet. Okay. I think you'd have to irrigate that broma ciliatus.

    You have to irrigate it every year.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:43:43.17)

    So something I want to address to us in the, yes please.

    I've got, you got me on a list, All right, so there's a couple other little wetland forbs that aren't commonly available. One of them is four flower yellow loose strife, Lysimachia quadriflora. There's some confusion. Yeah. And there's some confusion about these in the trade. Is there an invasive loose strife? Oh, there's an invasive purple loose strife. Don't get the, man, why am I always picking these ones that people have an attitude about?

    As you

    Nicolas Lirio (01:44:02.84)

    Another yellow loose stripe,

    of loose

    Kent Boucher (01:44:14.964)

    Rome and loose strife.

    No, this one's not that. I'm just kidding. It's Lysimachia quadriflora. We've gotten seed before commercially that turns out it was a different species of Lysimachia, but that's beside the point, guess. Availability of these isn't great, but that's a beautiful little wetland for that has like a specialist bee that uses its flowers. The bees collect oil rather than nectar from the flowers. That's interesting. And then another one is American water whorehound.

    Do they survive on the oil? mean, are they like?

    I think they're feeding it to their young. The oil, that's interesting. along with pollen. American water whorehound. Water whorehound. Is a little, it's a mint species. It does not have fragrant foliage, but it's got, you know, like the square stems and the little boroughs of flowers. Blooms all summer long. It's very green, bushy. And it is, this thing produces a ton of seed, a bunch of little seed. Did you get some from me?

    and whore.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:45:08.345)

    very green.

    Yeah, we

    Nicolas Lirio (01:45:18.785)

    No, we looked...

    We were, so we hand harvested a bunch of mint from a remnant.

    Oh common Virginia. Do we just plant mint on our farm and it takes over?

    Virginia Mountain.

    I see.

    Laura Walter (01:45:33.912)

    Well, there's, mean, there's mentha arvensis, or I think it's field mint, which is a wild one, which I thought about getting a hold of that. And that one actually smells like mint, you know, it's a.

    I know

    Kent Boucher (01:45:44.194)

    Well, we collected this off of remnant and in a wet part of the remnant. for years, Carol fought that American whorehound in there. He's like, there you got this jagged leaf weed in there. I just can't get rid of it. And we even tried to plug plant a new batch of it one year.

    And all that whorehound started coming up in those trays. he goes, there's that jagged leaf weeding again. And then we met you and you were, this would have been probably a couple of years ago. We did a podcast and you're like, okay guys, here's this new one I'm really excited about. And we're like looking up on our phone and we're like kind of looking at each other. This is what we've been fighting for years. It was just remnant stock that we happened to accidentally gather with the mountains.

    Mike!

    Laura Walter (01:46:36.01)

    in remnants. mean, we find that in just about every wet remnant that we encounter. It's also quite disturbance tolerant. So of course it can act weedy. yeah. And it flowers all season long, it holds onto its seed. You can just get a ton of seed.

    You can't beat

    Nicolas Lirio (01:46:56.162)

    biannual right?

    I don't think so. think it's perennial.

    Okay, okay, that really changes things because I thought it was a biannual. I think we even had this conversation. And the thing with biannuals is they have to be very cheap because unless they have a special use case like Partridge P, they're going to basically compete on the open market with Black Eyed Susan and Common Even Primrose, which are very cheap. They're very cheap to put in CRP mixes. So not that they wouldn't sell, but there's a limited

    pool that these biennials can go into.

    Well, mean, this one, even if it is a fairly short-lived perennial, believe it. Now you got me confused and I'm going to have to go back and double-check.

    Kent Boucher (01:47:41.954)

    tolerance for wet soil would give it some, you know, over.

    Right. Yeah. it's so productive that I think it could be produced pretty economically. Yeah. No, that's good. We've got a Dudley's rush, another wet species, tiny, tiny seed, but it combines really nicely. was like, I'm not much of a praying type, but I pulled up my combine to this plot and I'm just like looking at it I'm like.

    I just hope this comes out the right place and got going and it did. It didn't just get blown out the back. It ended up in the bag and we got a nice crop of seed off of this and the seed is so dense. It's so is Dudley's Rush. Yeah, there's like three and a half million seeds per ounce. It's so tiny. Yeah, so it's like this brick. looks like ground cinnamon.

    Wow, that's just dust. That makes white sage seem like-

    I hate it when I get seed like that because I'm just like, am I looking at seed or am I looking?

    Nicolas Lirio (01:48:47.63)

    What's fantastic is that when you clean it, there's nothing else that small. it's like, you're not going to add weeds in it. So it was amazing.

    And at that point you don't have to use, you don't have to use that much wind or anything. Man, that's kind of.

    Awesome. But the funny thing is, you know, we have the wind turned way down in the combine, right? And so things bind up. And so I'm sticking my arm up the cyclone because it's kind of gotten bound up in there. And this seed, when it gets...

    It seem like good for the manual. The manual seems like it says...

    Laura Walter (01:49:19.434)

    There's no moving parts up there. All right. I haven't been eating. But anyway, so I reach up there and my arm's all sweaty. It's summer, right? And the seed gets a little bit of moisture on it and it forms a sticky glue. And so I pull my hand out of there and it's just like, I'm completely coated. It looks like cinnamon. just so, it was really very cool. I wonder if it's.

    Yeah.

    Nicolas Lirio (01:49:39.011)

    Okay, you put it with some apple apple pie put it in there like cinnamon, you know, because if it's if it's that small it can be used as a spice

    If you ate that many seeds wouldn't they like you probably have like these little little green hairs grown

    Yeah

    Turn it up, chill.

    Kent hates sprouts. He hates sprouts. Isn't that crazy? I think that's literally crazy.

    Kent Boucher (01:50:00.206)

    I like most vegetation in my field.

    He doesn't like green things or things with color. That's not true. No, no, he eats a lot of veggies.

    I don't

    Gosh, we've gone over time and we haven't even gotten to the things that I really wanted to put on a plug for. What?

    Yeah. Okay. Wait. We got Laura. I budgeted that we would go. We'd go an hour over with you. knew.

    Kent Boucher (01:50:16.719)

    Put the plug in.

    Laura Walter (01:50:22.446)

    Nobody is going to listen to this whole thing. Are you kidding me? should put a thing in the end that's like a little.

    last time

    Nicolas Lirio (01:50:33.886)

    You know what's interesting? Like little thing about Justin, when I would talk to Justin on the phone, I was like, he was always super nice guy and nothing against it, but he's very, he's very monotone and he explains things very clearly and you know, and he takes like time to think about things. So which doesn't always make dynamic podcast both times that we've had him on the podcast to that point. He has been one of, if not the most listened to because this stuff's so interesting. And Peyton would tell me he's like, no, you have to have Justin on.

    He is so interesting.

    He's a total rockstar. And I actually was thinking about asking you guys to have me on with Justin because what's really fun, and maybe we do this someday in the future if you want to, if we have anything to say to each other. Justin and I had these conversations, I go to his door and I say, hey Justin, what are you working on? What are you thinking about? And we get into these conversations, it's just wonderful. I love, well, I mean, I'll have all my colleagues.

    And the interaction between us, it's like that the mycorrhizal network in the soil. We're sharing ideas and balance. Not at all.

    said anyway

    Nicolas Lirio (01:51:42.038)

    Got to give Laura Jackson some props on on some team building.

    Which we need to get Laura back on.

    Absolutely. So everybody here is fantastic. mean, Christine has helped to kind of spearhead our strategic planning. And I know that's a word that makes a lot of people break out in a rash, you know, but it's done in such a wonderful way that it brings us together and we just kind of cross pollinate our ideas.

    Maybe in your world, that stuff gets me jazzed. I like schedule out in advance our Hoxie strategic planning meetings and come with pamphlets and stuff. So something I want to talk about with this diversity, I want to talk to our listeners about this because we are, this is like a caveat, it's like a little asterisk I want to put on this conversation. More diverse mixes, more diverse prairies cost more.

    Donut

    Nicolas Lirio (01:52:33.962)

    Even if every single seed per pound or whatever seeds per square foot, even if it all costs the same diversity costs more. And if you take the extreme lack of diversity, what, is the most economically advantageous thing to do with your land right now? Not in this exact moment, but over the past 30 years, it is to have one crop on it. You put that one crop you make and not just do one crop for a couple acres, do one crop for millions of acres. That's how you, that's how you save and make the most money.

    Now let's go to the other side. If you're going to put lots of things, you're to be really diverse with your plantings on the ground. You're going to save less money and you're going to make less money. I'm saying that because I don't want people to go in with the expectation of like, oh, this is so great. We're like putting all of these things. We're putting all of this diversity in and then the bill for a mix, a quality mix goes from $275 to $400. Just adding diversity adds the price, but

    similar to getting your short-term gains, it is worth the extra price. The master of, I hesitate to use the word selling, because that is just a terrible word for what's going on, but the master of selling future prairies is John Judson. I do not know how he does it, but he convinces almost all of his clients he works with to have the highest quality, just random CRP.

    plantings and they'll the NRC has to be like, yeah, we'll cost share $270 of it. And he'll be like, look, if you don't spend $600, I mean, you need to spend $600 an acre and then he'll come to us and he'll get he also collects a lot of his own seed from his prairie, which is an incredible prairie. He'll get a bunch of the seed he'll put. And I've been on rants about us not putting Blazing Star and CRP, us not putting Canada and eminy and CRP. He does it because he was able to connect with the landowner who's actually spending the money.

    that it's worth it in the long haul. And you know what? Every single time for them, it is worth it.

    Kent Boucher (01:54:37.472)

    Well, that the reason John's able to do that though, is he has built up a tremendous amount of trust because of his reputation as being the guy.

    And I know that he has declined to work with people. John's so cool. You know, if there's no eco type available, he just won't put that species in the, he just won't plant it. Like if there's no Iowa blazing star around, he'll just be like, all right, well then I guess we're not doing blazing star in this thing.

    That's, I think that you might want to bring that philosophy up to Justin. Yeah, okay. talk to him about that because his experience with planting at Irvin Prairie is that he wants to maximize the diversity that we can achieve in that prairie. so, just a bug in your ear about that because that'll be a good thing to talk with Justin about.

    It's like when you build a house and you go, I'm to spend a lot more money and it's going to be higher quality. That's what diversity does with Prairie. I just want people to understand that not even the species cost more, just the fact that there are more and right. You're adding more species to the mix. So Riley's spending more time mixing up that kind of stuff. It means it costs more. I just want to get a in front of that horse because, or wagon in front of that wagon, for that wagon, because I do think that, that will be on people's minds. And I,

    I know if people are prepared, they go, okay, I really want diversity. And if they're prepared for a higher price upfront, instead of getting a sticker shock, there's a higher chance of people actually going through with the diversity. Cause I think it is worth it. I do think it is worth it. anyway, sorry. You had your like main thing you were going to.

    Laura Walter (01:56:15.438)

    Okay, well I just, I want to just remind everybody that the work that we do here on native, on producing species of native seed for enhancing the diversity available in the native seed industry, that work is only possible if there are remnant ecosystems that are protected and effectively managed. And so I wanna put a plug out there and many kudos

    to the folks who are doing that work. We have people who work for the DNR who are doing fantastic work in managing some of our remnants. I've seen amazing things happening at a place in Butler County called Blackman Prairie, how they've got some really difficult issues with woody encroachment, which is kind of like the single biggest issue I see in a lot of remnant prairies and they are working at it.

    I see that folks are doing thoughtful management in many of those DNR properties and big kudos to people who are in county conservation because many of our best finest quality remnant prairies are either owned or managed by counties or both. So our county conservation system is really important in maintaining those ancient grasslands. I am all for planting prairies.

    heck, I produce seed, right? Yeah, yeah. And I wanna see more prairie planted, but I also wanna see that its foundation is in those remnants. And if those remnants don't survive, we don't have anything. So, okay, that's exaggeration. But if they were lost, it would be a significant loss. And counties are doing so much good work. And there are folks in that county system who are recognizing that it's not uniform, that there are places that need more help.

    and they're forming partnerships with each other and with state and federal and nonprofit organizations. They're forming these things called habitat partnerships. And one of these days we should have, I'm like giving more homework, another podcast or series of podcasts about these habitat partnerships that are forming that are helping to build a community of practice around remnant prairie management. And they're tackling big problems.

    Laura Walter (01:58:35.926)

    with a lot of people in a short period of time and making a big difference and energizing the community and sharing ideas in the process. Yeah. So that's a big push. And then my last shameless plug is for the Iowa Prairie Network. I get to work with a volunteer, it's an all volunteer organization. I get to work with this volunteer board. I'm the president right now. Somebody else will be the president, hopefully in a year or two. And

    The energy in this group right now is fantastic. If you went to that, you were at that winter seminar, you would see people of all ages getting together, intense conversations among people between the talks, lot of interest in the topics that were brought up in the talks, and folks that want to actually do stuff. They don't want to...

    strictly build awareness and talk about prairies. They want to actually make things better for the prairies on our landscape. And so we've started a small grants program and we're able to distribute $10,000 to an educational institution and several counties who are doing work with remnant prairies around the state. And we'd love to have more people involved in the network.

    And we're looking for, especially for people who know how to fundraise because we want to raise money so we can do more good work on the ground. Love it. So those are my shameless plugs.

    you're looking for a skilled fundraiser.

    Laura Walter (02:00:05.102)

    Yeah, we love who is willing to work for free.

    I mean everybody on the IPM board that I've ever met are very skilled individuals, you know, and, it,

    A lot of us are, we're people working in the field, we're botanists and land managers and naturalists and that kind of thing. And so we were hoping to kind of branch out and get some more skillsets on our board that would be, that would help our organization just be more effective.

    I made a post on Hoxie

    person in mind that I'll recommend to you.

    Nicolas Lirio (02:00:38.696)

    Yeah, I posted the other day on Hoxanative Seeds thing. had a really intelligent marketing friend who was like, you need to do like half your posts as words, not videos or whatever. So I've been trying to do that thinking of things or coming up with stuff to say and I've made a post that was I'd said before a long time ago on the

    I'm going to use the wrong there and the wrong two.

    Yeah, I do that. do that. I just made that up. It's the least optimal language because it's like three lazy languages put together. And I put it's incredible how many of Iowa's problems could be fixed with Prairie and someone that I deeply respect who was not raised in any sort of conservation.

    English is

    Nicolas Lirio (02:01:33.186)

    very hyper-intelligent person, As thinks about the world in an analytical way and has from a very, from a, since I met them, their family, not in conservation at all. And basically they kind of was thinking about life and on their own at a pretty young age came to, and they're, they're deeply religious person kind of came to, you know,

    See you,

    Nicolas Lirio (02:02:00.27)

    conservation is one of the highest forms of human satisfaction and human health that we can have. And just started running with it. They were at the IPN conference and they are kind of a role model for me in that thinking that if we think we're just

    talking about now.

    Nicolas Lirio (02:02:28.098)

    helping some plants survive in Iowa, we're just fooling ourselves. mean, the heart and soul of what Iowa was built upon was that, and it feels like we're hollowing out our heart and soul. you'd be surprised at how many social or different other issues would quote unquote get better all of a sudden if we just had more native landscape, Iowa native landscape. There's a lot of native landscape in the world, and there's basically none in Iowa.

    and love to see it. So IPN is a really, really cool place. you guys brought some of, you brought a lot of, I would say research, lot of experts, but they were very interesting. Like I learned a lot about rattlesnakes that I just wasn't planning on learning that morning.

    Prairies connect a lot of...

    Yeah, I'm still upset with Tony for putting us right after Tom.

    That was your fault you asked you

    Nicolas Lirio (02:03:27.842)

    Yeah, I could be in the morning.

    You know, we ended up with a problem and that is that it's a really good problem when we asked our committee that was planning the meeting, we asked them to get the word out and see if they could invite speakers, everybody they talked to said yes. So it was the longest meeting I think we've ever had. no. Because we didn't want to say, you said yes, but. I'm just kidding. You can.

    actually B team and now

    always just come back to you can always ask us as just in case if you want like but was that the most people yeah

    If you need a good filler, we're

    Laura Walter (02:04:04.974)

    I'm not sure, it was a well attended meeting. I there were, I think if you include the high school students that were there helping out. Yeah. had good conversations with some of them. That's cool. Yeah, was fabulous.

    came and sat in on the set. I was was surprised by that.

    Nicolas Lirio (02:04:20.302)

    Man, it was the energy was awesome and there were people that had displays there that were as young as I think 23 or 21 or something. I mean like that was cool and old. A lot of old people there as well and so it was like and everything in between. I was cool kids were there.

    Yeah, I mean, it's a good cause when you have a community of people that's that diverse to come around.

    Alright, well this is probably a good time to announce it because we announced it at the IPN conference.

    I'm gonna have to lay in this plane. Nicholas has had coffee and he has-

    I forgot my bag.

    Laura Walter (02:04:51.342)

    Oh yeah, hit it, Never mind, it's at the end. We'll leave it for next I can't believe it. No, it's okay, I'll say it. I've been working for like five years on this project of upgrading the native seed production manual.

    yeah, yeah, we get emails about it.

    67 species on the website. That's fantastic. Especially, I mean, you guys probably all know all this stuff already, but if there are people who are getting started in native seed production or just want some propagation information about these plants, we don't hide anything. Our mistakes and our successes are there and you can see what worked for us. But yeah, it's got like a table of contents down the side and you click on Forbes and you'll see all the ones that have a production guide, have a.

    have a hyperlink there and you can click on it, you can print it, you can do whatever you want with it. Except, I mean, don't make a paper airplane out of it. Well, you could do that. It'd be fine.

    All right. Well, here's what I'll say about you, Laura. Your self-efficacy has to be insane because I don't know anybody who in a good way goes through as many failures as you do because there is no no one's written anything about some of the stuff that you're doing. So you're going through these failures and you just pop right back up with a good attitude and you say this is just on the way to success and saving the time. Yeah. Mado found a thousand ways how to not grow loose strife. And so and everyone listens.

    Nicolas Lirio (02:06:14.062)

    Basically what it takes, you gotta have a strong internal world because conservation doesn't start on the land. Conservation happens one mind at a time.

Hoksey Native Seeds
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Ep. 331 (Coffee Time) These Iowa Politicians Killed a Bill That Could Enhance Water Quality...