Funded by a Lehigh Valley Greenways mini-grant, Master Watershed Stewards in 2018 piloted a meadow conversion at Trexler Park. The Trexler Meadow project addresses the overuse and misuse of home herbicides and pesticides, as this can be a major source of water pollution. Vast expanses of lawn in suburban areas can be time-consuming and expensive to maintain. There has been a growing interest in using wildflower meadows as an alternative to turf grass. While large-scale, multi-acre meadow establishment projects have huge impact, the conversion process is daunting to homeowners. To address this challenge, we installed a quarter acre demonstration native plant meadow at the Trexler Environmental Center using a kill-and-seed + plug method to illustrate an attainable result for a homeowner.
