DECEMBER

Under the steady gaze of Long Branch’s stuffed wildlife, our volunteers continue to clean seed!

December 19: This Monday at Arlington County’s Long Branch Nature Center, 27 volunteers managed to clean over 15 pounds of our wild herb seed from a wide variety of species: three goldenrods (Solidago nemoralis, S. rugosa, and S. juncea), calico aster (Aster lateriflorus), white wood aster (Eurybia divaricata), round-leaved thoroughwort (Eupatorium rotundifolium), and giant sunflower (Helianthus giganteus). Fifteen pounds may not sound like much, but it’s actually an enormous amount, since many of those seeds are tiny. We used the Gary Putnam method of seed-cleaning. (See the notes for November 10 and 17.) Low-tech can be surprisingly effective! Once again, our volunteers came from the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists, and a local AmeriCorps contingent. We are very grateful to them all.

NOVEMBER

Volunteers clean the seed of various goldenrods, an important group of native meadow herbs.

November 17: Yet more threshing! (See the entry for November 10.) The volunteers are wearing masks, not because our seeds are a biohazard, but because all the fluffy, floaty stuff can be irritating to the throat. Today we did numerous feed-bags of goldenrod seed (Solidago spp., to the botanically inclined). Note here that Gary has introduced a refinement of his threshing apparatus: hardware-cloth screens on top of the bread-box things. Those white squares, made of PVC pipe, are the screen frames. Despite its name, hardware cloth is a wire net. The net openings are half-inch squares, a finer filter than the bread-box bottoms.

At the Fairlington Community Center in Arlington, volunteers threshed broomsedge, a native grass, for our meadow restoration work.

November 10: It’s not exactly as in the days of yore, but we seem to be developing our own communal threshing activity! (Key differences from the agrarian past: we’re reaping seed for wild plants, not domestic grains, and were doing it in suburbia.) This Thursday, volunteers from the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists and a local AmeriCorps contingent—15 people in all—gathered at the Fairlington Community Center in Arlington, to thresh broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus), an important native grass, for our meadow restoration efforts. We’re very grateful to ARMN’s Caroline Haynes for arranging the use of the Center. Our threshing procedure was worked out by another ARMN volunteer, Gary Putnam. Instructions: you put a sheaf of the grass on top of one of those upside-down supermarket bread-box things, then you beat the hell out of it with a bamboo stick. Instead of drifting off, the fluffy seed ends up trapped beneath the bread box. (Sometimes people cover the grass before hitting it.) As for the equipment, the bamboo, unfortunately, is readily available; there are several invasive bamboo species on the loose around here. The supermarket bread things are a rarity, but Gary has had great success in collecting them from grocery stores that have gone out of business. Gary is an ingenious and high-stamina tinkerer. (You can glimpse him in this photo; he’s in the blue shirt, middle row, second person in.) And while Gary has been collecting equipment, another of our ARMN colleagues, Rodney Olsen, has been rounding up volunteers. Rodney has been working with Lisa for more than a year now at this task and has greatly increased our outreach into Arlington. Our partnership with ARMN is clearly a seminal development for local conservation. We’ll be back at Fairlington in the days ahead, for more threshing.

OCTOBER

Matt Craig takes our seed-collecting efforts into the forest canopy.

October 18: Lisa and company are out in the woods and fields almost every day these days, collecting seed both for our own Wild Plant Nursery and for our public-agency partners. Most of this work proceeds at ground level, amidst the native grasses and goldenrods and other native herbs that make up the local meadows. But occasionally our effort gains altitude, as you can see from this picture. That’s Matt Craig, well up a very tall pitch pine (Pinus rigida) collecting cones. We’ll warm those cones up in an oven—an efficient way of getting them to release their seed all at once. And then the seed will join our nursery’s already extensive collection of woody species. In a year or two, when the little pines have grown out a bit, we’ll plant them back into the parks of the DC area.

Volunteers collect Indiangrass seed at Fairfax County's Huntley Meadows Park.

October 16: Another seed-collecting expedition, this time at Fairfax County’s Huntley Meadows Park. Huntley Meadows contains some of northern Virginia’s most important remaining wetlands, and the place is a botanical treasure house. Nobody is allowed in there to collect seed—except us. We consider that an enormous privilege, but it comes with a corresponding responsibility: we have to collect with a light touch. Our collecting must be sustainable, and must not jeopardize the reproductive potential of the plant populations from which we are gathering seed. This Sunday, we focused on Indiangrass (Sorghastrum nutans). Indiangrass is fun to collect; you just sort of strip off the seed with your hand and drop it in a bag. After a while the repeated gesture is sort of like dancing—it’s rhythmic. Our 23 volunteers filled a big sack full of the seed. Lisa and Chris also collected seed from various goldenrods (Solidago spp.), and from a not-very-common herb called “roundleaf throughwort” (Eupatorium rotundifolium). Another wonderful day, another wonderful haul of seed!

At Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve, in Loudon County, Virginia, we collected many large bags of seed from wild meadow species.

October 10: This Monday, our team joined a group of Loudoun County Master Naturalists for a seed-collecting expedition at Loudon’s Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve. We collected bags and bags of seed from many local meadow species, including wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia), purpletop grass (Tridens flavus), and elephant’s foot (Elephantopus carolinianus). Our Loudon colleagues Ron Circe, Susan Abraham, and the Friends of Banshee Reeks really went out of their way to make our effort a success—right down to providing a picnic at the end of it! Banshee Reeks (the name means, roughly, “ghost mists”) covers some 800 acres of field and forest. It’s Ron’s job to manage all of that, with just a single assistant. This may sound impossible, but years and years of work have begun to transform the property’s fields, formerly dominated by exotic fescue grasses, into areas that look more and more like native meadow. Through our seed harvest, Ron’s hard work and generosity will soon benefit Fairfax County’s meadows as well.

Volunteers extract seed from our huge collection of milkweed pods.

October 6: We took advantage of Thursday’s fine weather to clean a small mountain of common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) seed out at our Wild Plant Nursery. Our extremely productive volunteers—many of them Arlington Master Naturalists—tore open the wet, moldy milkweed pods, pulled the tufts of filaments off the seed (the tufts allow the seed to float in the air) and dropped the seed in plastic bags. Those pods were more than moldy; they were really kind of slimy. Not a job for the fastidious! But as one volunteer put it, “it’s easier to keep going than it was to get started,” so Lisa drove all the way back to the Brights’ house for another big helping of those pods. By the end of the day, three big feed-sacks of milkweed pods had been cleaned. Many future butterflies will owe their lives to our volunteers.

Soggy but busy: the check-out table at our fall native-plant sale did over $8,400 worth of business.

October 2: Our fall native plant sale was a record-breaking success. The sale was hosted in collaboration with the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists and took place on Sunday at our Wild Plant Nursery. Its goal was to raise money for ecological restoration work in Fairfax County parks. Visitors chose from a wide range of our nursery stock—by our count, 77 tree and shrub species and 99 herb and vine species were on offer, all of them grown from local, wild populations, as is the case with all our nursery plants. Patrons also had a chance to sample our Rising Forests Coffee, a product of our Tree Bank / Hispaniola program. It rained a little, off and on throughout the day, but that didn’t seem to dampen the turn-out—and the plants seemed pretty happy about it.

Preliminary results: some 80 people bought about 1,170 plants. Our sale revenue, including some donations, came to about $8,440. That’s the most that we have ever raised since we started hosting these sales. (Our first sale was in May 2010; we host two sales per year, one in spring and one in fall.)

We are extremely grateful to all the people who worked so hard to organize this event. More than 20 people were involved in that effort, and their work reached well beyond the sale itself, to benefit our nursery operation as a whole. Many thanks to them all.

SEPTEMBER

Lauren, Rodney, Jerry, et al. emerge from Waples Mill with bags of seed bound for our Wild Plant Nursery.

September 15: Lisa, a group of about a dozen Arlington Regional Master Naturalists, and Lauren, our new George Mason University intern, spent several hours collecting seed from Fairfax County’s Waples Mill Park, in the Difficult Run drainage. Waples Mill is a Fairfax County stream-buffer site; it also contains a large area, formerly in turf, that was released from mowing a couple of years ago, and that is coming back as wet meadow. Lisa reports that the place looks pretty good—which is why it was on her seed-collecting agenda. The haul this time included a couple of native grass species (deertongue and southern rye), and elephant’s foot, a forb that likes moist areas in sun or partial shade and that, in our judgement, must have received its common name from people wholly unfamiliar with elephants.

Seed-hugger: Lisa embraces a big bag of wild native-grass seed. The seed will be used to restore native meadows.

September 1: Lisa reports a successful seed-collecting excursion to Huntley Meadows, in the company of four of our seasoned collaborators from the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists. The goal was to collect native-grass seed for our meadow restoration efforts. “We got a lot!” she says, “and these Arlington people—they are really good.” High praise indeed. After the Huntley junket, Lisa departed solo for the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, where she bagged lots of additional seed. Quite a haul!

AUGUST

At the Wild Plant Nursery, Matt unclogs a growing-trough drain the day after Irene's visit.

August 28: We are very pleased to report that hurricane Irene spared our Wild Plant Nursery. By Sunday afternoon, the storm had cleared the DC area and we went out to the nursery to assess the impact. Nothing much to report! Some shade cloth had popped off the frames, and a few frame sockets needed to be reset, but that was really about it—apart from about five inches of water in the growing troughs. A lot of our seedlings were under water, but we got all the growing-trough drains working, and the seedlings will be fine. They won’t even remember. We were very lucky.

At the Wild Plant Nursery, Alison Smith, Watering Diva Extraordinaire, at right, with one of our St. John’s volunteers. (Our apologies for not knowing her name!)

August 24: It’s late summer and Hurricane Irene is an ominous but still distant Caribbean phenomenon. Work at our Wild Plant Nursery continues along its happy and productive course. Since the heat is not too bad, we’re already transplanting seedlings out of flats and into pots for next year’s season. And of course, we’re watering, as you can see here. It’s Wednesday, so our St. John’s volunteers are out to help with the watering, in collaboration with our Watering Divas. St. John’s Community Services is a charity that works to create social opportunities for disabled people. For several years, St. John’s clients have been volunteering at our nursery, helping to water, pot, and take care of the plants—and we’re very pleased to be working with them. Not much news here, of course, but Irene’s forecast storm-track is giving our work today an odd kind of anticipatory quality. What will this place look like on Monday?

JULY

At our Wild Plant Nursery, a Diva picnic.

July 31: About a dozen of our Watering and Weedings Divas came by our Wild Plant Nursery this Sunday for a picnic. In true Diva fashion, several Divas showed up early, so that they could do their nursery chores first, and all of them brought dishes to augment the Sangha’s (that is, Lisa’s) spread. It was a very pleasant occasion—low-key, fun, and memorable. Much like the Divas themselves! Some of the Divas are veteran volunteers, and some are newcomers to our work. But all of them share the same ethic—and their dedication and reliability have proven crucial to our nursery effort.

NOVA Soil and Water’s Lily Whitesell and her interns make signs at our Wild Plant Nursery.

July 29: This Friday, Lily Whitesell, Outreach and Watershed Programs Coordinator for the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District, visited our Wild Plant Nursery with a group of seven high school students—her summer interns—to help us with a project that we should have done long ago: putting in signs and labels. To date, you just had to know where things were in order to ... know where things were. You also had to know what things were, since, for the most part, our stock was not labeled. Nikki Oteyza, the Sangha’s Conservation Manager, had been working on a solution for this for a while, and she recruited Lily and company to implement it. First, the interns built durable, waterproof number signs to label each of our container-yard aisles. Then they assembled two types of botanical signs to help everyone manage the stock. Using vinyl cards and small plastic stakes, they hand-wrote signs that can be positioned in batches of plants. To make the second kind of botanical sign, they cut up “re-purposed” window-blind slats for use as labels for individual pots. (These slats are made of a plastic that is ideal for writing on with a sharpie—as many four-year-olds probably know.) By the end of the day, thanks to Lily and her interns, our nursery had become surprisingly literate!

Lisa explains the United States to our Central Asian and American guests. (Actually, she just talked about plants. American plants.)

July 23: A group of about 20 young people, more or less of college freshman age, came by our Wild Plant Nursery this Saturday for a tour and discussion. Such an event might not seem very newsworthy, except that most of these people came from Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan—nationalities not heavily represented in our nursery clientele. To say the least. Our guests were participants in the “Benjamin Franklin Summer Institute with South and Central Asia,” a program that brings students from those countries to the United States for several weeks. (There were also several American students in the program.) Among the things that the students wanted to see were some local environmental programs. They were also interested in getting a sense for how American civil society works. So we told them all about it—as best as we could! Post-discussion, the students helped weed some raised bed aisles, then one of them apologized for not having removed all of the weeds. We like that brand of civil society! Other observations: there were many comments about how amazing all the green is around here, since most of these people come from very dry regions. (Of course we pointed out that not all green was good.) And a conclusion from touring the ‘burbs of northern Virginia: “you build cities in the middle of forests!” (We agreed that we do indeed do that.) Many thanks to program organizer Mara Schoeny, from the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.

JUNE

At the Wild Plant Nursery, Chris Bright reads one of his quasi-poems during our Day of Reflection.

June 5: This Sunday we held our annual “Day of Reflection” at the Wild Plant Nursery. This event is as close as our Sangha gets to ceremony, since the Day includes a taking of the Bodhisattva Vows, for those of us formally committed to the Buddhist path. There is also a chance for everyone to speak, and reflect, on the Day’s theme. A different theme is chosen each year. This year’s theme was “Relationships”—between one person and another, and between people and other living things. Almost all of our attendees spoke, and all of the speakers had something interesting and, well, authentic to say. It was also rewarding to discover how all these various points of view complemented each other. There was music as well as talk—a beautiful performance by Jody Marshall on her hammered dulcimer, and Stephen Lewis and Andrew Keegan brought their guitars. We had a quick tour of the nursery, and the event wrapped up with a picnic.

MAY

The check-out line grows at the Wild Plant Nursery spring sale.

May 15: The spring plant sale held this Sunday at our Wild Plant Nursery was a huge success, thanks to the 20 volunteers who ran the sale, and all our various colleagues, board members, and friends who helped to plan it. We offer special thanks to members of the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists, our main partner for this event. ARMN members have been a powerful creative force out at the nursery this year and last, and the success of the sale was, in large measure, due to them. Over a hundred species native trees, shrubs, vines, forbs, and grasses were on offer, and loads of plants were carted off by local native-plant enthusiasts. We collected nearly $9,000—a record for us. All sale proceeds will go to restoration projects on Fairfax County parkland. And we’re already looking forward to our fall sale!

Eagle fledgling Colin Drake and troop build the mother of all cold frames at our Wild Plant Nursery. That’s Colin sitting on his project, and tying his shoe.

May 14: This Saturday was the day of Colin Drake’s Eagle Scout project at our Wild Plant Nursery. Colin is the younger son of Elizabeth Burke and Tom Drake. Elizabeth is a veteran volunteer and a member of our board. Elizabeth’s and Tom’s elder son, Dylan, built the shade frame over a large section of our nursery container yard as his Eagle project. Dylan went large; Colin, on the other hand, went for depth. Not that his project was small: Colin designed a 40-foot-long cold frame. Colin and Tom even built a sample section at home, to test the design. (It worked!) Today Colin and troop built the whole thing and set it up in our container yard. The cold frame consists of a set of exterior-grade plywood boxes, each eight feet long and four feet wide. The sections are open at the bottom but lined with wire mesh; their tops are hinged wooden frames with transparent plastic sheet stretched over them. The crew even rigged up lines from our shade frame to hold the tops open when we care for the stock that the boxes will eventually hold. The cold frame will function like a “mini-greenhouse” where we can protect sprouting seedlings during winter and early spring. During the warm season, we’ll use it for delicate stock that might dry out too quickly if it were kept in the open. We had been hoping to build a big cold frame for years but never managed to do it. We are very grateful to Colin and crew for this major piece of nursery infrastructure!

MARCH

March 23: The Shared Earth Foundation has generously renewed its support of the Sangha, with a $15,000 grant, of which $10,000 has been designated for the Wild Plant Nursery, and the other $5,000 for our "Rethinking Invasives Control" project at the Native Arboretum. Shared Earth was the first foundation to take an interest in the Sangha and has been supporting our nursery since 2001. Caroline Gabel, Shared Earth's CEO, has visited the nursery many times; she has also visited the Native Arboretum twice—evidence, we think, of her keen interest in our work. Caroline is also helping us extend our network of contacts into Maryland. We are very grateful to her for both the networking and the financial support!

FEBRUARY

Christmas fern, bracken, and a species of woodfern in our indoor “fern lab.”

February 16: Our fern experiments are going well. During the winter, Chris has been experimenting with production techniques for these important plants, to relatively successful effect, as you can see here. This photo shows some flats—actually they’re restaurant “clam shells”—containing fern “prothalli.” Prothalli are the little forms that sprout from fern spores. They don’t develop into ferns directly; instead, they produce gametes (sex cells) that, when fertilized, give rise to the form that we recognize as a fern. Ferns are among the plants that are hard to handle out at our nursery. Because of their complicated life cycle, it’s difficult to mass-produce them in the field, which is why Chris set up an indoor fern lab! Chris reports success with three species to date, so we’re off to a good start.

JANUARY

Arlington County Master Naturalist Gary Putnam and colleague employ the “Putnam Thresher” in the interest of meadow restoration. Patent not yet pending.

January 31: This Monday, as on every recent Monday, the Arlington Master Naturalists have been hard at it, cleaning grass seed for our Wild Plant Nursery. We’ll use the seed to grow plants for our large meadow restoration projects at Meadowood and the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge. For some of our grass species, separating the seed from the stems involves a great deal of work, so Gary Putnam, one of our Arlington colleagues, devised a simple threshing apparatus. It consists of an upside-down grocery delivery tray, some bungee cords for securing the grass to the bottom of the tray, a covering, and whatever the operator chooses to use as a flail. Take a look!

Look how well Gary's invention works! That's a lot of seed.

January 31, just a few minutes later: Gary's contraption could really be a big help, as you can see from this photo. There are two native grass species of great importance to our meadow projects—broomsedge and little bluestem—and that are tediously difficult to process. We have sacks upon sacks of this stuff. It looks like "low tech" could be the answer!

Arlington Regional Master Naturalists clean grass seed for our meadow restoration efforts.

January 24: About 20 volunteers took over the conference room of Arlington County’s Long Branch Nature Center to clean native-grass seed for our Wild Plant Nursery. This is a very labor-intensive process—there is no threshing machine available for these species!—and if we had to pay for this kind of help, we would probably be bankrupt. Propagating these grasses is a big priority for us this year, because of our expanding meadow-restoration efforts. We are very grateful to Arlington Regional Master Naturalists for organizing this event!

Volunteers crowd into Meadowood’s offices to clean copious amounts of native grass seed, to help restore Meadowood’s meadows.

January 9: About 35 volunteers, mostly students from Lake Braddock and Fairfax High Schools, spent this Sunday morning at Meadowood cleaning seed of two important native-grass species (little bluestem and deer tongue). Meadowood’s BLM staff generously allowed us to use one of their “office houses” for our seed operation, since it was far too cold to work outdoors. Volunteers packed the place—but even so, it was a quiet and focused activity. Cleaning grass seed is not easy. For the little bluestem especially, you have to tease all the fluffy seeds out of each stem, one stem at a time. And if you’re not careful, the feather-like seeds tend to float away, thanks to their amazing wind-dispersal adaptations. Capturing them in a bag required a lot of attention! Lisa said that “after three hours, the cleaned seeds could make one nice pillow. Now, we only have to make 50 more pillows!” (Lisa’s idea of a joke.) In April, we will sow all these seeds in thousands of little pots, and once they’re sprouted, we’ll transplant them into the meadows of Meadowood!