Seed collecting

Went seed collecting today to refresh the Nursery’s seed bank, especially for this years plants: CA sage brush, monkey flower, mountain mahogany, golden yarrow, goldenbush, piney-leaf goldenbush, and Juncus patens(?). The CA fuchsia was a bust… looks like it didn’t even bloom. The mountain mahogany seeds were scant, as prior years the tree’s looked like featured boa’s.

The Willow-Laurel loop is really a treasure chest of plants (thank you Sarah for this observation). Along Willow so much was dried up together, it was very difficult to determine identify plants.

The oak trees: scrub and coastal live, have acorns ....on the trees that were bearing. What determines if an oak will bear is a mystery. I saw at least 5 scrub Oak loaded with acorns. The acorns will be ready to harvest when they start to turn brown, and are easy to pull from the cap… probably in 3-6 weeks.

Scrub oak acorns:

Coastal live oak acorns:

Getting ready for the 2007/8 year

Met and talked with Meg Jones, our new Executive Director of the Laguna Canyon Foundation. We talked about the need for planters in March/April timeframe and the need for a meeting about restoration logistics: plots, methods, and followup. Meg made a strong commitment that the Restoration side of things would come together this year. When the number of planters and days, then we will have a better idea of number of plants we should do for the 2007/8 year.
The pictured 5 gallon pots are an experiment using recycled soil. Also this is a test to see how well plants can hold up to environment with only watering every two weeks. Pictured are scub oak, Quercus berberidifolia, and mountain mahogany, Cercocarpus betuloides. The final test is putting them in the ground when the rains start. This may be what we do with our tree-like plants.

Many thanks to Francisco, Rick and Fidel for helping with checking and cleaning rain collection gutter. This is very hard to do by oneself.

Welcome the 2007/2008 year

Let us welcome the new year for the LCWP Nursery. We’ll start our seed flats at the beginning of October, in anticipation of our plants being ready for planting in March/April 2008. We’ll begin with an introduction session, so everyone can meet each other, we can cover any questions, and the plan for this year can be discussed.