By LINDA McGURK
Indiana Correspondent

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — With a property the size of 40 city blocks, requiring 25 full-time landscaping employees, Indiana State University’s Terre Haute campus hardly qualifies as low-maintenance.

But under the leadership of ISU’s grounds superintendent, Stephanie Krull, the campus is implementing a plan that will save money, labor and natural resources.

“I have this vision of a healthy, urban and green campus, and we’re trying to get there with as few negative impacts on the environment as possible,” she said.

A landscape architect with a degree from Ball State University, Krull has been at ISU for nearly three years. One of her first goals was to drastically reduce reliance on lawn chemicals, including herbicides.

“I’m not an environmental extremist,” she explained, “but I believe simple is best, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. We have until now stuck to Roundup products for safety, but are reducing their usage as well.”

Not all gardeners embraced the change, but today 80 percent of the turf on campus – basically everything but the sports fields – is maintained without broad, regular application of chemicals. Instead, the gardeners continually fill bare spots with grass seed, and the presence of a certain amount of non-grass makeup is tolerated in the turf.

For the flowerbeds Krull picks plants that out-compete the weeds. “It’s more cost-effective than herbicides,” she said. “I don’t know if (abolishing herbicides) is a trend at other universities, but with all the budget cuts this year we’re probably going to see more of it.”
Besides, scrapping the chemicals can have unexpected benefits. “At Miami University in Ohio they made the decision to cut out the chemicals abruptly one year, and the campus just erupted in wildflowers,” she said. “It worked really well for them. The turf areas contain some clover, drifts of native shade-tolerant wildflowers and, yes, there are a few dandelions too.”

ISU is also phasing out synthetic fertilizers and replacing them with organic ones.

“The organic fertilizers are a little more expensive, but I’m banking on the fact that they will have long-term effects and won’t need to be reapplied forever,” Krull said. She added the campus gardeners use mulch mowers and leave grass clippings on the ground to help fertilize the soil. “We don’t bag any grass clippings at all.”

Another result of ISU’s attempts to make its Terre Haute campus sustainable is that all vegetable food scraps from the dining halls are collected and transported to a multi-station compost facility. The food scraps are mixed in with leaves and other garden waste, and once the mixture has decomposed it’s worked into the soil of the flowerbeds.

“Once we have mastered this process, we hope to completely replace the use of wood mulch in the perennial and groundcover areas,” Krull added.

“I encourage planting large masses of long-lived perennials, like knockout roses, day lilies and coneflowers, planted in drifts rather than as individuals. By mixing perennials and annuals, we also get higher impact for less money. Bulbs and seeds are cost-effective fillers.

“We have tried wildflower installations with mixed success, but are still working on a strategy to incorporate native meadow plantings, especially along the railroad tracks,” she said.

Lately, the campus has started planting more drought-tolerant flowers in order to reduce the need for watering. ISU gardeners have created a number of water retention areas – depressions in the landscape that allow stormwater to drain before reentering the water stream – and plan to convert them to rain gardens, starting this year.

This will involve installing plants that are both drought- and water-tolerant to beautify the areas, and increase their ability to purify the water as it infiltrates the soil.

“We try to put the right plant in the right place, then we get a higher success rate,” Krull said. “The right plants will cover the soil, condition the soil and purify the water.”