This year, Shasta Chapter’s Fall Native Plant Sale will coincide with Shasta College’s Fall Festival at the Shasta College Farm on the first weekend of October! That’s a little earlier than anticipated, but we’ve had a lucky, long run of July days under 100 degrees, with a consequent growth spurt in many of our species. The early October dates (October 2 for members only and October 3 & 4 for the general public) will also give our customers a little more sunlight and warmth to get new plants established before winter. It’s all good!
It’s been an action-packed summer session at Shasta College, where our nursery is granted space. We’ve been fortunate to have a student intern, Azren Carter, for June and July. Sponsoring a summer internship allows for regular care and troubleshooting during a time of year critical for nursery plants, but that is just the beginning of what it provides! Since its purpose is educational, sponsoring internships also pushes us to go beyond simply maintaining our stock to expanding our species list and passing on accumulated native flora experience to a younger generation.
Azren came to us first, as a volunteer in the spring semester this year. She is an Environmental Science major who will attend Cal-Poly Humboldt this fall to pursue a degree in Restoration Ecology. Experience in native species horticulture can be useful in a wide range of restoration projects, and we are happy to provide a foundation in that direction for Azren.
Photo by Stephanie Hughes.
In our most recent work at the nursery, we started cuttings of several sedum species. The process was documented by a new propagation volunteer, Stephanie Hughes. We hope she will continue to grace us with her photography!
We offer several sedum species in the nursery because they are easy to grow in containers, and they are considered to be fire resistant. As we start the cuttings, they require a moist, airy medium for rooting. We use rosettes from a potted sedum that was originally grown from a tiny, six-seed collection from a single flower. We also started cuttings from cream stonecrop, Sedum oregonense, which grows naturally at high elevation in Siskiyou County. Many of the blueish leaves are heart shaped! Again, we used fragments from a domesticated mother plant.
Photo by MaryAnn McCrary.
Shasta Chapter’s nursery is currently growing 75 species of native plants, and there will likely be more by sale time. Our expanding inventory of native plants is based on the ethical collection of small quantities of propagules on Shasta and Siskiyou county public lands. During this summer term, we visited four trails near Shasta Lake, where we did some collecting.
Even small amounts of seed require processing: usually some pre-treatment for germination, planting, meticulous seedling care, and a stepwise transference up to plantable size over three to six months. The process sounds brief when written out, but can fill nearly every hour of an individual’s time in practice. And often, the unexpected happens. Native species have interesting “life histories” that are not written down anywhere, but are observable to anyone who is trying to grow them.
As every gardener knows, there are intangible rewards to working with nature, and sometimes there can be quick returns from a collecting walk. Azren collected and planted native perennial sunflower seeds last week, which germinated in just three days. These sprouts have been up only a few days and are already an inch tall. Many other natives are so small at first that magnification is needed to see them! Growing native plants is fascinating!
Many hands do indeed make light work. During the two-month internship, our nursery also had volunteer help from Nickey Watson, Heather Bortolussi, Gabriella Dominguez, Jim Nelson, Lisa Ross, Ray Pfister, Stephanie Hughes, and John Springer. Publication volunteers, Laurie Burk and Heather Taylor, helped by getting the word out, which is no small part of the success of any nursery. The Chapter’s educational grants program and the goals of CNPS as a whole benefit from these volunteer donations of precious time and effort. CNPS doesn’t exist without volunteers like you!
Stay tuned! We are planning some fun events for artists and pollinator gardeners in the nursery in September. –MaryAnn McCrary