Volunteers plant native seeds at West Chicago Prairie

Steve Sentoff was fairly new to West Chicago when he and his wife began hearing about the West Chicago Prairie Forest Preserve.

Tucked in an industrial park on land that once served as a railroad stockyard primarily for sheep and a few cows, the idea of a high-quality prairie in town quickly caught their imagination.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this should be neat,’” he says now.

In 1990 they went to an environmental fair where they met Mel Hoff. Hoff was the founder of the West Chicago Prairie Stewardship Group, a volunteer organization that took root in 1983, just a few years after the DuPage County Forest Preserve District and West Chicago purchased the first portion of the site that now has grown to more than 300 acres.

The next thing he knew, Sentoff found himself actively involved in both the group — he’s now its president — and protecting the prairie.

“It’s one of the highest biodiversity preserves in DuPage County,” he says. “The forest preserve district manages it principally as a habitat for plants and animals.”

What that means for most of us is that the prairie on Industrial Drive about a half-mile south of Hawthorne Lane is a little hard to find, features a relatively small parking lot and offers narrow footpaths rather than the wide trails that mark many of the district’s best-known preserves.

It’s not the kind of place where you’re going to hold your company picnic, but it is the kind of place where you can get a real feel for the prairies that once blanketed much of the region.

All of that is quite all right with Sentoff and others like him.

“It’s accessible for people who really want to be there,” he says. “It’s more of a preserve and less of a park than some of the other preserves.”

But, like any prairie in these times, the West Chicago site needs a little TLC and that’s why the stewardship group is seeking volunteers to spend a few hours Saturday morning, Jan. 7, helping to rake in seed they collected in the fall from native plants.

The group will meet about 9 a.m. at the end of MacQueen Drive and then walk into the prairie from there. If you’d like to join them, call (630) 293-1627.

Sentoff says they’ve already removed invasive brush from about an acre of the prairie in preparation for Saturday’s project, which will go on unless the weather makes driving to the site dangerous.

“We want to put native prairie plants back in an area where they were being pushed out by invading brush,” he says.

Volunteers will work in teams, he says, with one person scattering the seeds and the other raking them in.

Volunteers are urged to dress for the weather, wear sturdy footwear and, if possible, bring their own gardening gloves. Sentoff will provide some basic instruction, but it’s really not that complicated.

“We have a more organic, random approach,” he says. “We tried putting seeds in lines and circles, but now we just randomly cover the area with different seeds.”

If January seems like a strange time to be planting, Sentoff says it really isn’t.

Nature has programmed the seeds to need a winter before they get ready to sprout and “the sloppier and ickier the winter is, it’s actually good for the native seed.”

Saturday’s effort is just one way in which the stewardship group works closely with the forest preserve district to keep the prairie healthy, he says. The district handles the heavy lifting, things like controlled burns or projects that require tractors or chain saws. But when there’s some down-and-dirty stuff that requires helping hands, the group is always willing to step up, providing roughly 1,000 volunteer hours a year.

That’s a lot of work, but for people who find joy in prairies, it’s worth it, Sentoff says.

After volunteering at the site for more than 20 years, he pretty much knows what he’s talking about.

“The West Chicago Prairie,” he says, “is as close to wilderness as we have in DuPage County.”

If you go

What: Volunteer restoration workday

When: 9 a.m. until noon Saturday, Jan. 7

Where: West Chicago Prairie Forest Preserve, Industrial Drive about a half-mile south of Hawthorne Lane in West Chicago

Info: (630) 293-1627