Shasta Chapter CNPS and Shasta Environmental Alliance took a short field trip up the Westside Trail on Sunday, December 8, one day later than scheduled due to a deluge of rain on Saturday. While only five of us made this quickly rescheduled walk, we planted over 200 acorns—three per planting for a total of about 70 plantings. We will follow up in the late spring, installing wire cages to ward off herbivores. Toyon and coffeeberry are recovering nicely from their root crowns, and white-leaf manzanita and buckbrush are up to 12 inches high, sprouting from seeds in cooler areas of the burn. Black and interior live oaks are resprouting nicely from their root crowns. The blue oaks are not resprouting much at all and all of their acorns were burned during the fire, which is why we are planting them. The area looks like it could become thick chaparral with toyon as the dominant plant in five to 10 years. As the site is on Bureau of Land Management land, BLM Ecologist Laura Brodhead helped us to get permission to plant acorns. Because rain cut short our planting time, we will plant some of the extra acorns on a New Year’s Day hike up the same trail. -David Ledger
