Native Plants

On this edition of Manager’s Special from Siouxland Public Media, host Mark Munger invites listeners along on a walk through a living prairie on the campus of Western Iowa Tech Community College. Joined by members of the Loess Hills Wild Ones, including prairie steward Rod Tondreau and seed collector Elisa Zapacosta, Mark experiences firsthand the careful art of native seed collecting—and the trained eye it takes to see what’s growing beneath the tangle of grasses and flowers.

The Siouxland Bike-N-Bite is this weekend and Molly Hewitt and Madeline Widman from ISU Extension and Outreach, reached out to Steve to record this week's Cultural Continuum.

Big Bluestem. Used to be, there were far more of them than there are of us. Tall and spindly, it grew up every summer from a thick bundle of shorter stuff…

It took me 31 years of Iowa living to take my first steps on real native prairie, the kind my great-grandparents must have set upon when they arrived in…