Natural Lands - The Magazine of Natural Lands Fall/Winter 2017, Issue 151 | Page 8

N ATUR A L L A N DS
making meadows.
Green Hills Preserve | Mohnton, PA | 201 acres
Assistant Preserve Manager Aubrey
Smith was getting weary. It had been
10 days of bouncing along the rutted
fields of Green Hills Preserve on
the tractor with the “no-till” seeder
trailing behind, looking for faint lines
in the soil to keep track of where
she’d driven. The end result, how-
ever, is pretty spectacular: 90 acres
of former farm fields converted to
native grassland meadow brimming
with wildflowers.
This restoration project—the
largest, one-time conversion from
crops to meadow in Natural Lands’
history—was part of the Conserva-
tion Reserve Enhancement Program
(CREP), a federal, state, and private
partnership that pays landowners
to establish and maintain native
plants on environmentally sensitive
land. These “resource-conserving”
plants—like the native grasses and
wildflowers planted at Green Hills—
help to control erosion, improve
water quality, and support wildlife.
Across all of Natural Lands’ nature
preserves, more than 4,000 acres are
enrolled in CREP or a similar reserve
program, generating monies we use
to underwrite the costs of maintain-
ing so much land.
We used a custom seed mix to
plant the Green Hills meadows,
augmented by some collected from
. SPRI NG / SUMMER 2 017
7
6