Well, this year, First Presbyterian's Green Team has expanded its work to transform two plus acres of vacant land, north of the church, into a native prairie.

- Well, we've had this church property for 30 some years.

It was a large property and it was a lot of mowing involved and it was all volunteers from the church that come out during the summer and fall and spring and mow, and it takes a lot of time.

You want things to look nice, but there was also a desire for doing something different.

And so our Green Team group got together and we started talking about this idea of a prairie.

We though it was a great idea, something a little more biodiverse than just turf grass.

And so we've been cooking this idea for a while and it turns out that the Baptist church, First Baptist across the street, put in a prairie and we said, "Oh, hey, this is great."

And so we had some conversations with them, got a chance to tour theirs and find out what they did, and that was further inspiration for us.

- [Mark] What is it like taking care of a prairie as opposed to taking care of grass?

- Well, it's a lot less mowing.

Our property folks and the folks who mow already said that it knocked two hours off the mowing time just with a little more than two acres put into prairie.

And so that's been great.

It's a lot less gas, it's a lot less labor.

And we were very intentional with this project to secure some grant funding and other things.

And one of the big selling points that we were making to our property committee and our church governing body was that we're not coming and asking for a line item in the budget and we can do this without it being an expense to the church.

And so it is saving money on mowing, gas, things like that.

There was some upfront expense to just get it installed and then it's a commitment in time.

We've spent time out here pulling out ragweed, pulling out horseweed, you know.

We're never going to get everything but trying to keep ahead of things just so it doesn't get established and start to crowd out what we want growing in there.

So it does take some commitment to spend some time out there, especially in the summer when it's hot and it might not be real comfortable, so you just come out early in the morning.

(birds chirping) - [Mark] How have you seen the landscaping around this church change in the last 30 years?

- The landscaping is one of the strengths, I think, of the church, and there's a lot of dedicated people who spend a lot of time taking care of the landscaping.

There's a lot of flowers and plants and different trees, and it's quite a point of pride for the folks that are working on it.

And we just wanted to see if we could expand that a little bit and carry it a little bit further on out into the prairie.

I have been amazed at how quickly the prairie developed.

The prairie just existed in our minds (chuckles) as a proposal as how we thought it was going to be a year ago.

And then in the fall, it was just dirt.

And as late as the middle of May of last year, there was no plant life to speak of.

And then the season changed, it got warmer, the rains came and the prairie just exploded into this profusion of blossoms, and that was a wonderful surprise.

The thing that strikes me virtually every time I walk through the prairie is the amount of life that has come to be in the prairie area.

Before we had the prairie, it was like this grass and it was essentially sterile, not much going on there in terms of life.

But now there's butterflies everywhere.

There's bees and other pollinators.

There are dragonflies, there's birds, there's rabbits.

There's a lot going on.

And the diversity of the planting, the fact that there's about a hundred different species of plants growing there, I think helps promote that.

- This is church property.

- Mm-hmm.

- [Mark] How do you think as a parishioner that God comes into all of this?

- I think that we are instructed to be good stewards of the land where we live.