On deeply cold, short days, many gardeners dream of spring. We imagine tucking small plants or loose seed into prepared ground on a warm spring afternoon. But working as stewardship volunteer has taught me that nature sows seed in a different way. As you’ll see below, nature sows on cool autumn days when the seeds are matured and fresh, ready for sowing. It spreads them generously between the dry stalks in our fields, in snowy woods or on icy wetlands.

Our stewardship crew tries to mimic nature’s strategy as much as possible. We often distribute seed onto snow and ice to let Michigan’s winter weather prepare the seed for a healthy start in the spring. It may initially seem counter-intuitive to toss hard-earned native seed upon the snow – but hey, it works for nature! So come along and see how the stewardship crew and its volunteers make it work for us!

But First, How Did that Seed Come to Be?

Wildflowers, grasses and sedges are all Angiosperms, plants that produce flowers that, when pollinated, produce “fruits” that surround and help disperse the seeds. Seeds begin their development as ovules within the ovary of a plant. Pollen grains produced in the anthers are delivered by the wind, insects, birds, or other pollinators to a receptive stigma. The pollen then grows a tube down to the ovary, delivering male gametes (cells with DNA copies) to the ovule. Once the male gametes reach the ovary, they combine with the female gametes in the ovules. We refer to this process as fertilization. The fertilized ovules develop into seeds. The ovary and its contents develop into the fruit.

We non-botanists commonly use the world “fruit” only for the sweet ones like peaches or cherries. But according to an article called “What is a Fruit?” on the New York Botanical Garden website, avocados, tomatoes, and cucumbers are actually the fruits of their plants, the reproductive parts of pollinated plants which carry and contain the seeds.

Each fertile seed within the fruit has its own seed casing to protect what’s inside. Which made me wonder…

What’s Inside a Seed?

According to another article entitled “What is a Seed?” on the same New York Botanical Garden website, a fertilized seed within its seed casing contains a tiny embryo of that plant, including its stem (hypocotyl), roots (radicle) and even some tiny leaves (cotyledons).

So every time we pop a berry into our mouths, we’re consuming miniscule berry plants. I never had a mental picture of that! Ah, the benefits of researching this blog….

With instructions, from Ben VanderWeide (our township Natural Areas Stewardship Manager,) my macro lens and my husband’s steady hand with a single edge razor blade, I managed to germinate a bean seed in my kitchen. (Why didn’t someone teach me this in fourth grade?) Below is the result. You can see the leaves, the stem and the root that emerged from the seed. The rest of the seed’s interior is called the endosperm which provides the nutrition (usually starches, oils and protein) that the embryo needs to grow.

That endosperm is part of the source of the nutrition that benefits the birds and we humans who eat seeds. “Seed,”by the way, can refer to many foods that humans eat. Beans, peas, lentils, walnuts, cashews, pecans, pine nuts, almonds, nutmeg, mustard and more are seeds in whole or ground form, though with some, we discard the shells or seed casings.

[Note: Seeds are an important reason not to pick flowers or harvest seed while visiting our parks. We’d potentially be absconding with the seeds needed to sustain natural areas and we’d be leaving less nutrition for wildlife.]

How Nature Plants Seeds

When a plant produces seeds, it releases those little capsules filled with life out into the world. While some seeds simply fall on the surface of the soil below the adult plant, take root and spread, many are dispersed with the help of their fruits. Some fruits help disperse seed in the wind. Others fruits have hooks and stickers that cling to animal fur or woolly mittens. Many fruits of wetland plants are buoyant. When they fall into a stream, lake or pond, they are washed along until finally resting on the muddy bottom or the moist shoulder of a wetland.

Some fruits provide a nutritious meal in exchange for a ride to a new spot. One set of these nutritious fruits get eaten by birds or other creatures, digested, and eventually deposited on the soil with the still viable seeds in a handy little bundle of fertilizer. Others are poked into the soil or under a log to be stored for a later meal, but being forgotten, take the opportunity to sprout. Nature evolved lots of different strategies to spread seed!

Here in Michigan, all this happens not in spring when gardeners plant seed, but from summer to early winter. Autumn rain and winter snow push the seeds onto or even into the soil. There they are exposed to the deep cold of winter freeze and subsequent thaw which helps them break open when spring sun warms the earth around them. Germination begins when the seed cracks open. The root (radicle) will extend down into the earth first. The sprout – composed of the leaves (cotyledons) and the stem (hypocotyl) – then rises toward the sun – and spring happens!

How We Humans Gather Seed for Restoration

Some of the native seed that we use here in Oakland Township for big restoration projects in our natural areas is purchased from Michigan native plant nurseries. But a very significant amount is also harvested right here in our parks by our stewardship crew and volunteers from summer to late autumn. As Stewardship Manager, Ben chooses sites in our township parks for seed harvesting and volunteers join him or Stewardship Specialist Grant VanderLaan to collect the mature seed.

Over the last few years, one of our volunteers, George Hartsig, developed a remarkable ability to identify and collect seed for the township. Alone or accompanied by other volunteers, George continued to collect throughout the summer and fall. The result this year was a bountiful harvest of free “home-grown” native seed to be sown where most needed in our parks and natural areas.

The collected seed from late summer to fall is cleaned from its husks and stems in November or December .(Early flowering species with seeds that mature in late spring and early summer must be fresh sown to get good germination.) Ben, Grant and many volunteers meet at the pole barn on Buell Road to spend a few hours chatting while rubbing the dry stems against screens to separate the stems and husks. The seed then falls through the screen and into wooden boxes below. Seeds with tough husks can be crunched underfoot on tarps and then separated . (You should come next year! It’s fun!)

Some seeds are relatively big and easy to see.

Other seeds are tiny and fine, even dust-like.

The seed is then labeled by species and dated as to when and where it was harvested. Some seed goes to wetlands, some to dry uplands, some to woodlands. Seed from uncommon or rare plants in special habitats like the Wet Prairie on the Paint Creek Trail are spread in their original location in spots where native vegetation is sparse or trees and invasive shrubs have been removed. The stewardship crew then creates seed mixes for various kinds of local habitats.

Sowing Nature’s Way – On the Snow

The Wet Prairie is where I met up with George Hartsig and four other volunteers to watch how the seed is sown. The process is so ancient and so simple because it mimics nature’s way of seeding. Each volunteer gets a container which is dipped into a bucket filled with a locally gathered seed mixture. That day the Wet Prairie crew sowed a special mixture suited to shallow water. In a moist area of the sunny section of the Wet Prairie, they began by gently sifting it through their fingertips (see below left) or tossing the seed upon the snow much like a breeze would do. Seed is easy to see and spread evenly on this white canvas. Rain and snow will do the job of pushing seeds down onto or into the soil to germinate.

In the woodland north of the Wet Prairie, volunteers spread the seed along the ancient stream bed of Paint Creek. In 1872, the creek itself was moved to a straight ditch along the eastern edge of a railroad bed that later became the Paint Creek Trail. These days, that wandering, former stream bed stays moist thanks to rising ground water, rain and snow melt. As a result, moisture-loving plants thrive there – a good place for the shallow water seeds.

The mixes used at the Wet Prairie contained dozens of different species of plants suited for wet or dry, sunny or shady habitats. So here’s a slideshow of twenty-one of the wildflowers and grasses that we hope to see blooming at the Wet Prairie in three to five years. It can take that long for many of these plants to grow the deep roots that make them so hardy in Michigan’s changeable climate.

After dispersing seed, the volunteers helped out the stewardship crew by piling small tree and shrub limbs that were cut during restoration work. The piles will either be burned on the snow in safe spots under the open canopy or chipped at some future date.

Now it’s well known that any crew, even the excellent one at the Wet Prairie, requires some supervision. On this cold February morning, it was provided by a curious Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) who moved from tree to tree, keeping an eye on all of us.

George hypothesized that the hawk thought that all those seeds might attract an edible bird or perhaps moving the wood would expose a tasty mouse. Aaron, though, suggested the hawk was simply enjoying its own personal home improvement show as we worked on seeding and and tidying up its territory.

I’m going with that theory.