NATIVE MINNESOTA - Dustin Demmer works hard to bring back native plants that were once common across MInnesota prairie. (Star Eagle photo by Melanie Piltingsrud)
By MELANIE PILTINGSRUD
Staff Writer
Dustin Demmer is the entrepreneur behind Blazing Star Gardens, a business just a few miles west of Clarks Grove, that seeks to re-propagate some of Minnesota’s native prairie flowers and grasses by growing the seeds – and knowledge – that people need to be successful when they decide to implement prairie restoration projects.
Demmer grows plants from native Minnesota prairie grasses and flowers that you would have seen here long ago. He sells some of the plants at Souba Greenhouse & Garden Center in Owatonna in the spring, but, from most of the plants, he harvests the seeds, cleans them, and then sells those top quality seeds to wholesalers, who then mix them with other native plant seeds for use in prairie restoration projects.
Such projects are becoming increasingly popular. But why are they so important? Demmer explains: “A lot of people are starting to become concerned about monarchs, bees, pollinators, and they’re wondering why they don’t see any in their gardens, and it’s because most people have planted daylilies and hostas and stuff that we brought over from Asia, Africa and Europe, and those plants don’t have the same insect associations as the plants that the insects in America [..] evolved with. Most people know that monarchs need milkweed to lay the eggs, because it’s the only thing the caterpillars eat, but a lot of insects have the same kind of specific relationships with really specific species of plants. Another example is: painted lady butterflies need either pussytoes or sweet everlasting or pearly everlasting, which are all native perennials – perennials that, if you were to come here a thousand years ago, that’s what would have been growing.”
Demmer explains how his business was born: “I worked for an AmeriCorps program called the Minnesota GreenCorps, and I was doing rain gardens in the city of Owatonna and the city of Northfield, and rain gardens are a way to improve water quality by infiltrating the water off of roofs and parking lots and streets. And rain gardens are engineered to fill up with water after a rainfall, and then be dry until the next rainfall, and Minnesota native wetland plants are perfect for those types of conditions. And we also use a lot of the native perennials in those gardens.”
Demmer continues: “And, as I was learning about a lot of these plants, I was like, ‘Wait, why aren’t we planting them in any garden – like the garden around your house or around your mailbox?’ And I realized that most people just don’t know about it. People are familiar with daylilies and hostas and sedums, because that’s just what is in our landscapes already. And not only that, but when you do start learning about these native plants or pollinator plants and you start looking for them, there’s really very few places that you can buy them. [....] If you wanted to buy prairie smoke, you literally can’t even find them in Albert Lea or Austin.” Demmer adds the caveat that the Albert Lea Seed House has been known to carry some.
Demmer decided there needed to be more suppliers. “I did the AmeriCorps program for a year and a half,” he says, “and then I started working for the Freeborn County Soil and Water Conservation District, doing a lot of agricultural projects, but I kept kind of wanting to go back to more focus on native plants, gardens, restorations, getting them back into our landscape, so that’s when I founded this business. So it all started with growing plants for retail and also doing garden installations, design, and maintenance.”
Demmer focused his business on seed production, creating large garden plots on a parcel of the family farm, owned by his father, Jerry Demmer.
“Basically, anytime there’s a prairie restoration, like a corner bean field, or a pasture that someone wants to put into prairie, you have to buy prairie seed,” says Demmer. “You can’t just let it grow out, because it’ll just be weeds, because all the prairie seeds are long gone. So there needs to be people who produce the seed.” Demmer says it takes a lot of seed to restore an acre of prairie. He estimates 10 to 15 pounds of anywhere from 40 to 150 species of seeds of flowers and grasses.
For those interested in restoring a plot of ground to prairie, there’s a lot to learn, and just planting the seeds isn’t sufficient. “Most of the prairie flowers won’t even flower the first year,” says Demmer. “They might not even flower the second year.” Meadow blazing star, or as some gardeners call it, liatris, might bloom the second or third year after it is planted from seed. Demmer explains that, if meadow blazing star seeds have been planted in a field where everything is allowed to grow, they will be choked out by weeds or other, faster growing native plants before they have ever had a chance to flower. Black eyed susans, which are some of the first plants to bloom in a restoration project, will out-compete liatris. That’s why, contrary perhaps to one’s inclination, it is important to mow off a restoration project once it has grown about knee high, so that slower growing flowers receive the space and sunlight they need to flourish. “It’s really difficult in reality,” says Demmer, “because people see the prairie and they want to see those flowers. They want to see a field of black eyed susans, ‘cause you can get that the first year – you can get all those pretty flowers, and they’ve spent a lot of money and a lot of time, and they don’t want to mow it.” Demmer says this is a common problem, but, because restoration projects are costly, you want long-term results.
“There’s a reason why most of our ditches are no longer prairie,” says Demmer. “Because we brought in these Eurasian grasses that just out-compete them. Weeds are weeds for a reason. It’s because they spread really easily. They can survive in a lot of places where prairie species and woodland species and wetland species are more conservative.” Many of the original prairie flowers also need a specific habitat. Meadow blazing star and prairie phlox, for example, are only found naturally in swales that are sometimes wet and sometimes dry.
How did we go from prairie flowers to weeds? Demmer explains, “Some of it is just choices we’re still making to this very day.” Mowing a ditch in September, for example, cuts off meadow blazing star before it blooms, which means it also doesn’t have a chance to produce seed. Some seeds also take a long time to mature after the plant flowers. Mowing a ditch twice in a summer prevents plants with a longer seed-production period, like Michigan lily, from producing seed. Such plants quickly disappear. Per Demmer: “They put all this energy into producing flowers, and then you cut it off, and all that energy is just gone.”
Using the same mower from one field or ditch to the next is also exacerbating a big problem – the spread of wild parsnip. Demmer estimates that within 20 years, wild parsnip will be in every single ditch and pasture. Wild parsnip is particularly problematic because it can cause severe burns and blisters even days after the plant has come into contact with the skin, because it contains chemicals that make the skin ultra-sensitive to sunlight. “It’s getting tracked by mowers,” says Demmer. Counties mow multiple ditches, and farmers, who may have fields many miles apart, also spread the seed by moving their mowers and other equipment from one location to another. “I might be [spreading it], too,” Demmer admits, “because I walk in ditches with wild parsnip, and it could get stuck in my shoes.
“Some weeds we brought in on purpose. [S]mooth brome and reed canary grass is what you see in almost every single ditch,” Demmer continues. “Because they grow really fast and they spread by roots, and they quickly establish. They were brought in as pasture grasses, as road grasses.” According to Demmer, people tend not to consider the origins of a seed at building or road construction sites, or in pastures. “Whether a seed is native or not isn’t even in their equation. [They ask], ‘How fast does it grow? How well does it establish in roadsides where you don’t want erosion?’ So that’s what they were looking for, and we’re still seeding some of these things.”
A restoration project that is well maintained will eventually out-compete a lot of those weeds, according to Demmer. “Even thistles can sometimes get out-competed in prairies without having to spray,” he says. “Restoration people have noticed it time and time again; it’s not a myth.
“And then with prairie restorations you’re supposed to start burning it every three to five years,” Demmer continues. “Historically, there used to be wild fires that just blazed across the prairies. And prairie fires are a big part of the reason that it remained a prairie and not a forest, because the prairie fires would help kill the trees and keep the trees low. But the prairie flowers and the prairie grasses, they survive in the roots. Especially if the fire is in early spring or late fall when everything is dormant anyway, they could care less, and they actually get rejuvenated after a burn because it’s more sun to the base of the plants.” Demmer says he’s seeing a lot of prairie restoration projects with trees like boxelder, cottonwood and ash springing up because the plots never get burned off.
“There is maintenance with prairie restorations that you can’t ignore,” Demmer summarizes.
While Demmer’s business is seed production and not implementing the actual restoration projects, he does occasionally undertake such a project. An example of his work are the restoration projects on the roundabouts in Mankato, which he designed, implemented, and continues to maintain.
“I want to change people’s minds about what these projects can look like,” says Demmer. “Because I think they’ve seen a lot of these types projects that haven’t turned out so well.” Many people become discouraged when they see a failed restoration project, deciding they don’t want that on their property. “I want to change that to: they see good projects, good designs, good installations, good maintenance, and not expensive, but in a lot of ways saving money. I want them to see good projects, like the roundabouts in Mankato, and say, ‘Hey, those look pretty good. Let’s do that on more roundabouts.”
Amid this fast-paced world, Demmer encourages us, not just to step back and smell the native prairie flowers, but to help them flourish.