Many hands make light work. And for volunteers collecting and processing native seeds, it can be fun work, too!
On any given fall day, you can likely find volunteers collecting native seeds from a local prairie. For years, many organizations, including Clean Lakes Alliance, have offered this volunteer opportunity and encouraged people to join us in the prairie.
You may have heard of seed collecting, the process of gathering native seeds after they’ve flowered to establish new plantings elsewhere. You may have even participated in a seed collection yourself.
Preparing native seeds
But you may not know what happens after all those seeds are collected. Before they ever hit the soil and become flourishing new plants, a lot goes into processing and preparing collected native seeds.
Big benefits for our lakes
It’s no secret that native plants benefit the water quality of our lakes, rivers, and streams. You can think of prairies as acting like giant sponges, absorbing rainfall before it can turn into runoff that can harm water quality. With their incredible ability to filter polluted stormwater, provide valuable habitat, promote soil health, and prevent erosion and flooding, adding more native plants to the landscape is a no-brainer when it comes to improving our waterways.
Many hands make light work
Enter the Dane County Parks Seed Collection Program, which in 2024 alone processed 3,093 pounds of collected native seeds. Each year, Dane County Parks (DCP) utilizes hundreds of volunteers to help with seed collecting and processing, including Clean Lakes Alliance volunteers.
Every fall, after our native plants have bloomed for the season, volunteers venture out into Dane County’s restored prairies to collect seeds by hand. With the possibility of hundreds of native plant species in a prairie, it would be almost impossible to use machinery to collect their various seeds. This is because every species goes to seed at different times, at different heights, and with different types of seed casings.
Volunteers are given a specific plant to look for when collecting seeds, making sure not to mix species. Identifying a single species in a large swath of prairie may seem like an intimidating task, but you’d be surprised how easily it comes to new and repeat volunteers alike. Back at Dane County’s processing site, staff dry the collected seeds to remove any moisture that could spoil them. They then run the seeds through machinery that mulches the casings, releasing the seeds and separating larger debris. What’s left at the end is almost entirely clean seed to be weighed and stored for future spreading.
Millions in savings
Since the 1990s, DCP has been utilizing collected seeds from more than 220 species to restore or create new prairie spaces. Volunteers make it easier for DCP to meet their goal of restoring a few hundred acres each year by gathering abundant amounts of seed. If Dane County had purchased last year’s 3,093 pounds of seed from a nursery, the cost would have exceeded 1.2 million dollars! Fortunately, seed collecting is becoming a popular and economically savvy volunteer activity that continues to yield promising results for water quality.
Big impacts
Since 2017, DCP has provided seed for 1,656 acres of land, including lands owned by partner organizations, such as the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and Holy Wisdom Monastery. Of the total acreage, 262 acres were converted to oak savannah, and 1,246 acres were restored to native prairie or wetland.
All those little seeds can add up to big improvements for our lakes. The more native plants we have surrounding our shores, the healthier our waters will be. If interested, look for opportunities this fall to join us in the prairie or check out Dane County Parks’ event calendar online at danecountyparks.com/events to make a positive difference in our watershed.
This article first appeared in the 2025 Greater Madison Lake Guide. Read more from the publication.
