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Stearns County's New Westside Service Center To Feature Native Greenery

St. Cloud Times - St. Cloud, Minn.
Author: Kirsti Marohn
Date: Jul 18, 2009

It's designed to serve busy drivers who need new license tabs and patients visiting public health nurses. But Stearns County's new westside service center will feature something else planners hope will make a lasting impression: roughly 9 acres of restored native prairie grasses, shrubs and wildflowers.

It's part of an effort to make the county's newest building in Waite Park environmentally friendly as well as a demonstration site intended to educate and inspire. "There's going to be a lot of people coming in and out of here," said Greg Berg, shore land specialist with the Stearns County Soil and Water Conservation District, which provided almost $50,000 in grant money for the project.

The 45,000-square-foot building off Stearns County Road 138 near Mills Fleet Farm is still under construction and won't open until October. But work already has begun on shaping the surrounding terrain to help catch and hold stormwater that runs off the roof and parking lot. Rain gardens and infiltration swales will allow pollutants to filter out and the water to seep into the ground rather than running into the nearby Sauk River, Berg said. The plant-lined basins will store and absorb a considerable amount of water, helping to keep the level of the flood-prone Sauk more consistent, he said.

Some of the most noticeable features are the parking lot medians. The depressions lined with native shrubs, plants and flowers will be a marked contrast to the typical strips of mowed grass or raised asphalt lined with curbs and gutters. Parking lot medians usually are difficult to mow and maintain anyway, Berg said. "Why not use it as a water quality and landscaping feature?" he asked.

Princeton-based Prairie Restorations is handling the project. Company President Ron Bowen said it's a challenge to find the right mix of trees, plants, shrubs and wildflowers that will thrive in each location. "This soil can be dry as a bone or flooded, and everything in between," Bowen said.

Under the grant program, the seeds and plants must be historically native to the area. All come from Minnesota and most are from Stearns or neighboring counties, Bowen said. "We want to restore pieces of the native landscape to this site," he said. Interest in native plants is growing, Bowen said.

Prairie Restorations completed a similar project recently at CentraCare Health Plaza on St. Cloud's north side. The company has done projects throughout the state for public buildings, corporations and residential homes.

The westside center will have about 1 acre of turf grass compared with 9 acres of restored prairie. Native plants aren't maintenance-free, but generally require less watering, mowing and fertilizing than turf grass, Bowen said. Attitudes have been evolving since people used to complain that native prairie plants looked like weeds, Bowen said.

"More and more people understand that we don't have to have turf on everything," he said. "We don't have to have everything 2 inches high and mowed ... Perceptions are changing."

Fire Brings Life To Greens - A Controlled Burn Will Help Blaine's TPC Golf Course Fill With Native Grasses And Growth That Will Reduce Its Environmental Impact

Minneapolis Star-Tribune - Minneapolis, MN
Author: Maria Elena Baca
April 15, 2009

An acrid cloud hung over the Tournament Players Club a couple of days last week. At the ninth hole, orange flames devoured dried-out grasses and licked at the edges of the sandy native area. TPC general manager Alan Cull sat in a golf cart and watched as workers applied flames into the brush. It was just another day of spring cleaning at the Blaine golf course, which opened late last week. "It's done to promote growth," he said. "It will help eradicate a lot of the unfriendly species you don't want to have in there."

Later in the season, the burned areas will be flush with 2- to 3-foot native grasses and wildflowers, tall fescue, switchgrass, red fescue, little bluegrass. And the natural areas, about 10 acres of the 250-acre course, will offer haven to wild turkey, deer, bald eagle, red-tailed hawk, osprey, raccoon, fox and deer ... oh, and probably lost golf balls, too. The use of native plants and the storm drainage ponds to reduce water and chemical use are part of a larger philosophy at TPC to minimize its environmental! impact and encourage ecological diversity.

Let's be clear. The golf course was burning off undesirable plants with help from professionals from Prairie Restoration, a Princeton MN native landscaping firm, and with the blessing of both the Department of Natural Resources and the Blaine fire marshal. "This is not something just anybody can do," said Prairie Restoration land management coordinator Justin Sykora. His company has worked two years on the spaces at TPC; this burn was planned last fall. Blaine Fire Marshal Bob Fiske said he approved this spring's burn based on last year's plan. There's more to it than it appears, he said, from wind speed and direction to recent rainfall, and any factor out of place can mean a postponed burn.

Back at the course, Sykora and his crew were scorching out the reed canary grass and thinning horsetail. These aggressive exotic plants tend to have shallower roots, and are more easily killed by the flames, wh! ile native plants have deep roots that survive the winter -- a! nd the f ire -- dormant underground. "You get wildlife, birds, butterflies, fox," Sykora said. "They need to do this. If we don't, it becomes a monoculture. ... What they're trying to achieve here is a polyculture." The course is in its eighth year as Audubon International Cooperative Sanctuary, a designation it earned by merit of its environmental planning, management and outreach.

Tim Kelly, district administrator for the Coon Creek Watershed District, said the course had engaged the Watershed District, as well as several other government agencies, from the very beginning, a couple of years before construction began. "I've been involved since it was a sod farm," he said. "I was involved with the original site evaluation and the evaluation for flood plain and wetlands and then the design." The result, he said, is a course that has minimal impact on the area around it, and which, in fact, uses stormwater drainage ponds to solve an existing flooding probl! em. "The impact is kind of benign," Kelly said. "The objective was for (golf course) to be benign. ... They have had no identifiable negative impact on water quality, and they have done a very good job at responding to and caring for their resource. They've been good citizens."