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So, I'm kind of a wildland gardener. I live in a tiny two bedroom
apartment in Pacifica, California just south of San Francisco on the coast.
We get a lot of fog and I have a tiny porch, so my container gardening at
the moment is limited to two houseplants inside and a single nasturtium out
on the porch. However, I commute way into the central valley of California
three days a week to do plant restoration work on government land. I get
paid to get my gardening kicks, which makes me miss the awesome garden I
used to have in Oakland (it had a STREAM running through it!) a little less.
The plant restoration work I do focuses mostly on a single very steep
hillside. We are doing various experiments in an attempt to maintain a
population of a very rare plant, Amsinckia grandiflora (it's a Borage).
This population was human-created in 1993 to try to alleviate the risk of
extinction to the species which had only 3 populations. Good thing, too,
as one of the three native populations was washed away in an El Nino flood
a few years ago.
One of the things we do every year is track survivorship of the little
Amsinckias as they sprout and grow to flowering. So last week my partner
and I went out and put little string loops around about 100 seedlings. We
put a flag through each loop so we could find it the next time we came out.
We'll go out every couple of weeks to check and see how many of our marked
plants die during the growing season. (Hoo boy, gotta love California -
it's the GROWING SEASON in November!)
We found a lot of seedlings up in our main population, but last winter we
expanded the population downhill. The area of the expansion was cleared
and we planted perennial grasses in a checkerboard-type pattern. There's
not a lot of leaf litter in the expanded area so seedlings were easier to
find, but there weren't as many of them and they seemed smaller than the
ones further up the hill. We're going to go back next week and check to
see if there's been additional germination in that lower area. Maybe the
lack of leaf litter is delaying things in the lower part of the population,
or maybe it's just 'cause it's downslope and kind of darker. This spot is
at a canyon mouth and it's north facing. And very steep. I've mentioned
that. It's really steep. When it's wet and slippery you get visions of
tumbling down to the bottom and lying there with a broken leg and you've
dropped the 2-way radio halfway down and you have to crawl on your belly
like a reptile to get to it to call for help...not like I'm paranoid or
anything... It is steep enough that the safety dudes have told us we
should think about having tie-off when we're working (like mountain
climbers), but all of us agree that being tied off might be more hazardous
- nothing like an EXTRA trip hazard on a steep hill!
We're checking for extra germination either Friday or Monday - I'll let you
know how it goes.
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