(upbeat music) - Tom And I love to have monarch butterflies visit our yard, and we're so happy to have several each day.

However, we have neighbors that have a big area of native flowers and grasses, and they get swarms of monarchs.

I am Mary Holm, host of "Prairie Yard and Garden."

And let's go visit a company that specializes in growing and producing native plants.

Let's find out why native plants are good and why they make the monarchs so happy.

- [Announcer] Funding for Prairie Yard and Garden is provided by Heartland Motor Company.

Providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of truck country, Heartland Motor Company, we have your best interest at heart.

Farmer's Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative.

Proud to be powering Acira.

Pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities.

Margaret and Mark Yackel-Juleen, in honor of Shalom Hill Farm.

A nonprofit, rural education retreat center in a beautiful Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

And by friends of Prairie Yard and Garden.

A community of supporters like you, who engage in the long term growth of the series.

To become a friend of Prairie Yard and Garden, visit pioneer.org/pyg.

(upbeat music) - [Mary] Whenever I see a Monarch, I think of the song that went, "Don't worry, be happy" as they go fluttering by.

Years ago, we only grew a few native plants at our greenhouse.

But their popularity has just exploded over last number of years.

Now there are even greenhouse and nurseries that specialize in the production and sale of native plants.

Today we are visiting with Bre Bauerly of Minnesota Native Landscapes to learn more.

Welcome, Bre.

- Thanks, Mary.

Thanks for coming out here today.

- Tell me, when was Minnesota native landscape started?

- We have been in business since 1998, so just recently celebrated our 20 years and we're cruising right along.

- [Mary] What is your position with the company?

- [Bre] My position I'm really lucky.

I work very closely with customers directly, helping answer questions, helping set them up with the right seed and plants for their products.

So really fun every day is a little bit different.

Answering questions and just helping put the right seed and plants in the ground.

- Bre, what is a native plant?

- Native plants are plants that are from Minnesota or the Midwest prior to human settlement.

So they've been here longer than humans have been here and they thrive in our growing conditions, which as most people know are a little bit tricky sometimes with really harsh winters or droughts like we've been having.

- [Mary] What are the different components or the main components of your company?

- [Bre] We operate under a few different divisions.

So we have sort of some service offerings from construction, vegetation management, grazing, and our prescribed fire company, Red Rock Fire, as well as this production side that we're looking at here today, our production facility here in Foley, another one, England and Minnesota called our Blue Stem Farm, and in Lonsdale Minnesota.

So down in the Southern part of the State.

Each division kind of has its own specialty and the work that they do kinda varies throughout the year.

So in the winter time, we spend a lot of time doing buckthorn removal and riverbank reconstruction, building rain gardens.

And in the springtime, we might be doing anything from seeding new prairies to burning old prairies, sort of everything in between.

- What is Minnesota Native Landscapes?

- So Minnesota native landscapes now known as MNL is the come rooted in ecological restoration.

Meaning we use native plants to restore prairies, wetlands, woodlands, shorelines, kinda back to their natural environment.

And we have this mission "To heal the earth through the use of native plants."

And our 10 20 30 goal, where we plan to positively impact 10 million acres by the year 2030 through the work that we do, the plants and seed that we sell and our mission partners.

- [Mary] Do you do most of your work around the Twin Cities or do you actually go out and do work in other places?

- [Bre] We do work Statewide.

In fact, we reach out to the Midwest quite a bit now too, but we work all over the State on all different types of projects.

So some types of projects, we work more in the Twin Cities area and then other types of projects we might be out in the country or up north.

- [Mary] Do you work mostly with individuals or with government agencies or both?

- We work on all sizes and all types of different projects.

So for private land owners, for the State Federal government and energy partners, kind of everything in between.

And one thing we don't have is a retail store.

So we offer an online store with our full seed and plant offerings where we ship our seed mixes and plant kits across the Midwest.

- And then do you also sell at events?

- We do kind of a fun variety of different kinds of events.

So from county tree sale forums in the Spring time to some different partner hosted events where we do plant and seed sales.

- Do you grow your own seeds and plants?

- We do grow our own seed and plants.

We grow just a really wide variety of different species, both in seed and plants for use in our seed mixes and our individual plant species and plant kits that we sell in our online store.

- [Mary] About how many acres do you have for production here?

- [Bre] Here at this location in Foley, we have a couple hundred acres of native seed production, and we have two more production facilities where we have several hundred acres as well.

- [Mary] My goodness, when we came in, I saw irrigation pivots.

You use those also?

- We don't have to irrigate everything, but we do grow such a wide variety of species.

Some that do require a little bit more moisture here in our very sandy soil.

So some species are irrigated while majority of the ones here in Foley are not.

- [Mary] 'Cause usually the native plants can take some dry, I think.

- [Bre] Native plants are extremely adaptable.

So, you know, out here in full sun, under the irrigator, we're also growing some woodlands species as well that can tolerate that extra sun with a little extra drink of water.

- Wow.

Do you have plot plots with mixed species in them too?

- We do have some mixed species plots or plots that we allow more diversity to move into.

And typically those are hand harvested species.

So things that we're cutting the seeds by hand.

This field, we would harvest by hand.

It kind of has an interesting growth habit where some of the plants sort of crawl and then stand upright and each plant is a different size.

And this is harvested by hand with our wonderful team of production workers.

- [Mary] My gosh, how do you do that?

- [Bre] They spend a lot of time moving through the fields very carefully with hand cutters and cut each stem and put it into a bin and move through the field.

- [Mary] How do you store the seed after it's cut?

- [Bre] After the seeds are cut, they are stored in bins so that they're able to continue drying until they're ready for cleaning.

- [Mary] Do you have air that moves through those bins then to help them so they don't get moldy?

- [Bre] Yeah, we have different kinds of bins, but for the most part, they all allow airflow or we use fans as well for, for drying them out.

- [Mary] How long do you have to dry the seeds?

- [Bre] It depends on the species.

Some dry fairly quickly, and some spend quite a bit of time in the dryer bins.

- [Mary] How do you label everything to keep it straight?

- [Bre] We use our own kind of combination of letters that represent scientific names and the different fields and where they came from originally and sort of our own short codes.

- [Mary] Do you sell all of your seed or do you use some of it in the production of plants?

- [Bre] We do sort of a combination.

We sell the seed.

We use a lot of the seed on our own installation projects as well.

And then we also save seed for the many varieties of native plants that we grow in the greenhouses.

- Would it be possible to go and see your growing operation too?

- Yeah.

Let's check out some of the greenhouses.

(upbeat music) - Flowers whisper beauty to the world in so many ways.

It's hard to think of a room, field or garden that doesn't look better with flowers.

And in Minnesota, we enjoy a virtual rainbow of flowers that bloom across our State.

We have marigold, sunflowers, dhalias, coneflowers, gum friena, Zinnias and Verbena.

Really nothing brightens up your home more than a cleverly arranged bouquet of flowers.

And that's why today we're visiting Rustic Designs flower farm near Belgrade.

Started in 2011, Rustic Designs not only offers a lovely selection of flowers for your home and weddings, but they let you come out here, pick your own flowers and teach you how to place them together for a perfect arrangement.

Today I'm with Mary Solbrekken, who takes care of the many flowers here at the farm.

- My tips for designing a perfect bouquet, including cutting a very long stem length for your flowers, cutting linear flowers, as well as focal flowers.

Make sure you don't forget about your greenery and in your filler as well.

My favorite Minnesota grown flowers are basically everything that I grow here.

That includes sunflowers, dhalia, Snap dragons, lisianthus and the list just keeps going on and on.

If you're nervous about arranging your own flowers, I say, don't worry, relax, have fun with it.

There's many rules for design out there.

But with that, I always say rules are meant to be broken.

Whatever is appealing to you, doesn't have to be appealing to everyone else.

- While it's lovely here, you don't have to drive across the State to see these beautiful flowers.

Go to minnesotagrown.com to find a local cut flower grower near you.

- [Bre] So here we are next to our greenhouses in our outdoor plant production area.

This is where a lot of our seed from the production field comes over here.

We're growing mostly into six packs of native plants.

The seed that we're not using for our plants is cleaned and stored for going into seed mixes.

- When do you start the seeds that you use to grow the plants in the greenhouse?

- It's kinda fun up here.

We actually fire up the greenhouses in about January of the year.

So when everything else is under a blanket of snow and pretty chilly, we're just getting the greenhouses warmed up and thinking about waking up some of the native plants for the growing season.

- I've heard that sometimes you have to treat the native seeds a little different.

What is that called?

- So first as part of our seed cleaning process, we clean down the seed really well.

We remove a lot of the chaff and the holes and things like that.

And then after that, each individual species has kind of a log of what it requires.

But some seeds are scarified or stratified for varying periods of time and then grown into the plant production.

- What do those two terms mean that you just said?

Stratification and scarification.

- Scarification is sort of like scratching or cracking of the outer seed where stratification is sort of a cool moist combination to promote germination.

One thing you can do at home to kinda mimic stratification naturally, is you seed native wildflower mixes in the Fall time so that they kinda go through this cold, freezing thawing cycle naturally at the soil and snow surface.

Kind of as the insulated snow melts and pushes the seed into the soil surface.

It freezes and thaws, and it mimics the stratification that we might be doing in the greenhouse right there at your own project area.

- You mentioned that you label your seed too.

Why is that so important.

- With native plants and seed?

It's really important to consider where it's coming from, what the local origin is.

So you wanna use seeds that are local to your area, or, you know, in a certain proximity to your area so that you know it's gonna thrive there.

It's something that has existed there historically, and it's something that has really adapted to your individual unique growing conditions.

- When the seed is planted here, is that done by a machine or by hand?

- Different species seeds are different.

So some can be sort of done by machine, and some are pressed in by hand by some of our great greenhouse crew.

- Do you grow in different size containers depending on the variety?

- We do grow in some different size containers.

We know that certain species don't prefer the smaller packaging and some do really well in our traditional growing size of six packs.

- [Mary] When you transplant, I assume you would plant them into a flat of some kind, and then they get transplanted.

Is that correct?

- [Bre] Some of our species, we direct seed right into our six packs and some, we start in tiny cells and then we upsize them into the next size, and then maybe even to another size from there.

- [Mary] How do you upsize them.?

- [Bre] By hand.

- [Mary] So it's all hand transplant and hand done.

- [Bre] Oh, yep.

For the most part.

- [Mary] When do you move the plants from the greenhouse out into this beautiful production area?

- [Bre] Certain species will stay in the greenhouse until they're ready to ship in the mail or until they're ready to go out onto projects.

And some will get moved outside depending on its preference for growing conditions.

- [Mary] And then how do you maintain the plants out here?

- [Bre] Yeah, so there's actually a lot that goes into maintaining the plants when they're in their six packs and plant cells.

they still get weeds and they still need to be weeded and it's done by hand and very carefully meticulously before they go out to projects or get shipped out to our customers.

- [Mary] Do you have to worry about deer or rabbits coming in and eating your plants?

- So luckily here we have a lot of food options to go around, so we don't see a lot of browsing by deer or rabbits.

And in general, they don't love native plants.

They will browse, and especially if they're hungry.

You know, nothing is too deer resistant if they're hungry enough, but they don't always like native plants.

They're a little bit hairy, the stems are a little bit tough.

So they don't in general tend to be their favorites.

In the greenhouse production, our most common damage is done by caterpillars and things like that, but we leave them in place to feast on the leaves of the plants.

And I think our customers know if they come with some holes in the leaves, that they were giving maybe a monarch caterpillar, a good home for a while.

So it's the least we could do.

- So when you have a project, then how do you decide which plants to grab and use for those projects?

- It's really fun to kind of see what's growing this year and decide what might look nice on a individual project, whether it's a rain garden or a very dry roadside prairie planting, to kind of scroll through the inventory, see what might be just the right fit for a project and get it out there and get it planted.

You know, in planning a native planting project, it's important to consider the flowers which everybody loves, but also some habitat plants as well.

You know, our native grasses and sages, and those can be incorporated into any type of native planting.

So whether it's adding natives to an existing perennial garden bed, or maybe along a shoreline or, pollinator planting.

Kind of a combination of different plants is really important.

- How many different species do you grow?

- We grow a couple hundred different species between our flowers and grasses and sages.

- How do you decide how much to grow each year?

- You know, we really enjoy growing unique species.

Ones that are kind of hard to find.

And we have our favorites too, and things that are kind of the favorite of local gardeners as well.

- [Mary] What are some of the plants that people love the most?

- [Bre] One of the plants that people seem to love the most is the Meadow Blazing Star at the production field that we saw earlier.

That is a favorite of gardeners and a favorite of the monarch butterfly.

Butterfly milkweed is another very popular plant.

It's unique, beautiful orange color and shorter growing height makes it a popular choice in gardens.

We love the different kinds of sunflowers and some of the shorter or height grasses like prairie dropseed and little bluestem are very popular as well.

- [Mary] This has been so interesting to see how you grow the plants and where you grow them.

But I'd like to find out a little bit more about how you actually help your customers.

- [Bre] That would be great.

(upbeat music) - I have a question.

I really wanna grow pumpkins and squash, but I have such a small space.

Are there any varieties that take up less space?

- Yes.

Yes.

If you don't have a lot of garden space, like you can see here, we've got usually acres and acres to grow pumpkins.

Your smaller garden space, you can put varieties that are more of a bush type growth habit rather than long trailing vines.

There's certain squash that come in these bush type sizes that stay contained within about six by six feet.

So that's not as bad as something that would trail off for like 16 feet or 20 feet in all directions.

Namely all your typical favorite varieties, such as buttercup and acorn and butternut, and even delicata, they all have this long trailing growth habit in their original heirloom form.

But there's been breeding work done in recent years to make these varieties a little bit more contained and growing in these bush type varieties.

So you can find all those varieties such as your acorns and your butternuts as a Bush type squash that grows really nicely in a small backyard area, or even in containers on your patio for example.

- [Announcer] Ask the Arboretum experts has been brought to you by the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska.

Dedicated to enriching lives through the appreciation and knowledge of plants.

- Bre, if somebody wants to do a native planting, what should they do?

- That's a great question.

We can kind of help from beginning to end with any kind of project.

Whether it's just giving advice over email or having a consultation on your own property, helping you DIY a project, or we can take it from seeding, through long term vegetation maintenance.

- When is the best time to do a planting for native plants?

- The fun thing about native plants is you can plant them in the Spring or in the Fall, is actually a really great time as well.

So we're kind of just getting into Fall seeding season and it's still a great time to plant native plants as well.

Kind of into September and almost October, if you don't mind planting dormant plants.

- [Mary] How do you prepare the soil for a native planting?

- The most important thing when getting started is to make sure that you're kinda starting in a weed-free, open soil.

So you wanna see bare soil to get good seed to soil contact.

Or if you're planting life plants, you just wanna make sure that you're starting in an area that isn't gonna give you long term weed pressure.

- [Mary] How do you get rid of the weeds and this vegetation that's there?

- [Bre] Yeah, it's so hard.

You know, first it's really important to identify what weeds are there.

Are they perennial, are they annual?

And from there kind of consider the size of your project.

Can you you till it up, can you smother it with something for a while?

We have a weed suppression mat that you can roll out and plant plugs right into that keeps weeds from growing for about three growing seasons.

So it kinda gets those plant started.

- What are some of the unique ways that you see that people are using prairies?

- I really love to see prairies popping up more and more, whether it's in the backyard, at a school yard, in front of libraries, corporate campuses, and even on solar energy projects.

So those really large acreage projects where they're implementing pollinated or friendly solar, where they're using diverse native seed mixes, rather than just treating the vegetation that's growing up underneath the panels.

- [Mary] Why do natives work so well for that?

- [Bre] So we can select different native species based on their growing height so that they don't interfere with the collection of sunlight and then use kind of a diverse mix of grasses and wildflowers that incorporate habitat into these solar arrays where you might have unusable space otherwise.

- [Mary] Does your company also do plant maintenance on the native plantings?

- [Bre] We do maintenance on such a wide variety of sites, and we use a wide variety of techniques.

So everything from implementing prescribed fire on prairies every three to five years to using sheep to graze on our solar farms or using goats as follow up to our forestry mowing for buckthorn control.

And we can bring the goats in a couple of times to browse down buckthorn weed sprouts, poison ivy, and other problematic species that people don't like to deal with.

- Do you have to worry at all of you use the sheep about their wool getting caught with the seeds?

- That's a really good question actually.

We use primarily hair sheep, so it's a different breed of sheep.

And they're not wooly, they grow a kind of a hair texture and they don't have to be sheered and just a little bit different than the wool sheep.

- [Mary] How long do you leave the animals in to do the maintenance?

- [Bre] It depends on how many animals are running at one time.

Sometimes it's more animals for a shorter period of time.

And sometimes it's fewer animals for a longer extended period of time.

Just depends on the project.

- [Mary] Do you ever have to bring them back again?

- [Bre] Yeah.

So that's one thing that sometimes people don't realize is that it's not usually a one and done sort of clearing, but more of a maintenance technique that is usually repeated at least two times, sometimes three times.

- [Mary] Do you keep the goats here in the wintertime too, and the sheep?

- The goats live across the road from our production farm here Foley and they spend most of their winter here.

We have lambs and kids in the springtime and raise them up.

And eventually they make their way out into projects as well.

- [Mary] Do you always need a big area in order to do a prairie planting or can you have even just the small spot in your yard?

- [Bre] Prairies can be any size anywhere from a five by five area, like a pocket Prairie, all the way up to an acre or a hundred acres or more.

- [Mary] What is a pocket Prairie?

- [Bre] A pocket Prairie is a small planting of prairie plants in a sort of a unconventional way.

So my pocket prairie is a collection of 27 native plants of nine different species.

And it comes in a kit with everything you might need to establish a prairie in your own tiny five by five plot.

So any level of gardener can take it on.

You really just need a screwdriver, a hammer, and a box of hardware and the plants.

- [Mary] Do you provide the plants for that then too?

- The way our pocket prairie works is first you get your hardware kit shipped out to you, and you're able to install your weed suppressant mat and your edging and your sign, read through the booklet and kinda get an idea of all of the rest of the steps.

And in a few weeks after we will ship the plants out and it's sort of a plant by numbers.

The weeds of present mat has numbers painted on it, the correspond with plants in the kit, and then you get to plant them and watch them grow.

- [Mary] This has been so interesting.

Thanks so very much for teaching us about native plants and how we can all use them.

- Thanks for coming out, seeing our goats, our butterflies, and our flowers.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for Prairie Yard and Garden is provided by Heartland Motor Company.

Providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of truck country.

Heartland Motor Company, we have your best interest at heart.

Farmers' Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative.

Proud to be powering Acira, pioneers in bringing state-of-the art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

And by friends of Prairie Yard and Garden.

A community of supporters like you, who engage in the long term growth of the series.

To become a friend of Prairie Yard and Garden, visit pioneer.org/pyg.

(upbeat music)