Ramblings of a seed picker

Cleaning Wild Rose (hips)

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Alison

Rose hips before harvest

Wild rose is a perennial forb that colonizes large areas where native grasses are thin. I think it’s an essential component of mixed grass prairie restorations because it blooms early in the summer and withstands drought better than many other wildflowers. In fact it was one of the most persistent plants through the dust bowl. I need to find the citation for that fact. Wildlife rely on it for food during difficult winters when little else is available. It is not a preferred food.

What follows are a series of pictures that show how we clean rose hips. It is not necessarily the best way and I welcome suggestions or comments on how to increase efficiency or improve seed quality.

First we shatter the rose hip with a hammer mill. This separates seed, flesh, and the irritating hairs that lie between the two. What cannot be shared is the sweet smell emitted during this process. Rose hips have one of the most pleasant aromas of all the seed we clean.

Did I mention the hips have irritating filaments? After shattering I like to separate the dust and hairs from the seed and dried pulp. By this time my skin is crawling in spite of wearing long sleeves and gloves. We set a box fan on a tarp and run it on medium. You can see the material separation below.

Picture of separated seed on tarp and a box fan

Box fan set up on a tarp where seed and the irritating hairs that surround the seeds can be separated.

After separating the coarse from fine particles the seed can be run through a fanning mill. Sometimes I screen the seed through 1/4″ hardware wire to reduce bulk.

Picture of screen on sawhorses with tarp below and seed

1/4″ screen to separate larger chunks of pulp, small hips, and stems.

Bulk of seed has been reduced by half and weight by 25%

I’ll add pictures as I continue to clean this lot of seed.

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New Production Plot

Posted on July 12, 2017 by Alison

New production plot, potatoes in the foreground will be next year’s (2018) plot

Our land is smothered by smooth brome (Bromus inermus). To better establish new production plots, we grow vegetables for three years before seeding native species. We start by solarizing the new garden with clear plastic before planting the first vegetables the following year. This eliminates most of the smooth brome and gives us three years to reduce the annual weeds like buffalo bur and amaranth.

In the 2017 plot pictured above I seeded Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), Junegrass (Koeleria macrantha), Carex gravida, Bee balm (Monarda fistulosa), and Candle Anemone (Anemone cylindrica). These are all somewhat shade tolerant. This wasn’t a great vegetable garden because it lies west of a small grove of trees on slope rising above it. The sun doesn’t reach all of it until late morning and then it is full sun through late afternoon. The only advantage to this location is available moisture because it lies in a large swale. In fact you could see where runoff had eroded it slightly early in the spring. I have seen all of the plants listed above except for the Anemone. Below are some pictures of seedlings and weeds to be pulled.

Junegrass and Black-eyed Susan

Kentucky bluegrass, weeded

Bee balm seedling

Yarrow seedling

Vervain (Verbena stricta) and Buffalo bur to be removed

Red root pigweed before removal

Probably Scribner’s panicum, not seeded but a welcome addition

View of the plot during weeding

I’ll update this post as the plot develops. Unfortunately, the farm is in the first stages of drought and I fear this will slow plant development and survival but such is the life of a farmer. It’s tempting to water it but I want to see how the drought affects each species’ development and weed pressure.

After a little rain some of the wildflowers really popped. Some of the yarrow and black-eyed Susan bloomed this first year. The primrose blooming germinated last fall and some of the vervain showed up when the plot was still in vegetables.

One month later and the wildflowers popped after 1″ of rain.

picture of deervetch and black-eyed Susan in seed plot

Deervetch, Lotus purshianus, an annual legume with pink flowers and dagger like seed pods in front of blackeyed Susan

One week later the weeds exploded after the rain. Sandbur, seen below, is an annual grass common to sandy, well-drained soils. They are easy to identify after the seed head emerges and before that by noting their flattened profile.

Sandbur and poverty grass proliferated on the east and shadiest edge of the plot.

Picture of plant seedlings including Junegrass

After weeding the Junegrass finally gets some light!

More updates to come!

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Porcupine Grass – Hesperostipa spartea

Posted on March 12, 2017 by Alison

Porcupine grass and prairie ragwort

One of the most elegant grasses of the prairie is porcupine grass. Few plants animate wind and light conditions as well as this cool season native. But for all of its grace, few plants cause more pain to the non-observant passerby, particularly when the seed is ripe. Too heavy to be carried far by the wind, this seed spreads by hitching a ride on things in motion. The sharp tip of the seed will pierce and cling to pant legs, shoestrings, exposed socks, as well as the fur and feathers of other prairie users. Now you know the reason for it being called porcupine grass. I also think it is cached by rodents such as the thirteen lined ground squirrel and mice. For years there was a ground squirrel family that harvested the seed in our plots just before I could get to it.

Large, brown, pointed seed with long black awns that will slowly twist and screw the seed into the ground

Last year we were finally able to harvest a pound of seed from our plots. I don’t know where the ground squirrels went: owls? badgers? coyotes? better seed site? The grass shows up in areas where we didn’t plant it making me wonder if some former cache sites have germinated. Here are the particulars:

cool season bunch grass growing 1-2′ tall and as wide
very slender leaf blades that arch out from the growing point
stiff stems that hold the seed head above the plant, gradually drooping towards the ground as the seed ripens and becomes heavier
requires full sun to part shade in well-drained soils, will not tolerate wet sites
plant 3/4″ deep in the soil in early spring, preferably after 21 days of moist stratification, water if not, or sow fresh seed with the awns intact and the seed will plant itself! Be patient, the seed may not emerge until fall or the following spring.
Our seed is dormant, 4% germinated in 21 days of testing at a seed laboratory so it will benefit from cold moist stratification.
If you’d like to harvest your own, look for the seed in late June. I pull my hand up the stem and pull the seeds off. They come off easily when ripe. Then immediately cut or break off the long awns. Otherwise the seed will become a ball of tangled, twisting awns.

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2017 Native Seed Conference

Posted on February 21, 2017 by Alison

We just returned from the National Native Seed Conference in Washington DC. The title is a bit of a misnomer. Most of the attendees were from the western US where federal agencies are the largest landowners and buy millions of pounds of seed for restoration after wildfires, drought and other natural disasters, and for rehabilitation of lands disturbed by mining, invasive species, and other human disturbances. All of the sessions this year related to the National Seed Strategy released in 2015 and formulated to address the need for more and better native seed. Over the next month I’ll try to cover some topics in more detail but here were some of the issues and concepts presented at the conference that captured my attention.

Resilient plant communities will adapt to climate change and resist invasion by non-native species better than degraded ecosystems. But how do we increase resiliency? More diverse seed mixes that represent a variety of plant families: asters, legumes, grasses, sedges, and less common like roseacae. Plant species with varied life cycles: warm season, cool season, annuals, perennials, even shrubs. Plant early successional species like annual sunflower or at a minimum don’t despair if they appear in abundance. Consider the root structure: fibrous, taproots, and rhizomatous.

The seed strategy stresses the importance of seed transfer zones which should help preserve the genetic diversity of individual species. I’m still trying to figure out how this might work in Nebraska. A logical starting point is to source seed by EPA ecoregions or the vegetation communities of Nebraska developed by Robert Kaul and Stephen Rolfsmeier. The vegetation units must be large enough to support several populations of a given species without varying too much in climate or soil conditions. This would be a good project for the Nebraska Native Plant Producers to pursue in cooperation with Game and Parks, USDA NRCS, Nebraska Crop Improvement, and other interested parties.

If genetic diversity is the goal, how do current testing and sampling methods based on commodity crops contribute to that end? Currently not well. No one wants to introduce an invasive weed like Palmer amaranth or cheat grass into a restoration but when an agency buys 1-2 million pounds of native seed some contaminants are probable. Cleaning and testing seed deserve a separate entry in this blog but I learned some crazy things at the conference. I should have known that noxious weed seeds are on a separate list from noxious weeds in each state and some restricted or noxious weed seeds are native like annual sunflower, smooth dock and horsenettle. These will not ruin a restoration or pollinator planting. Another surprise was the revelation that the standard viability test for dormant seed is not very accurate for some species. It underestimated the viability of some Carex (sedge species) by three to six times what actually germinated in a greenhouse study. Yikes!

All in all I enjoyed the conference and returned home with several new/renewed goals. Our niche will continue to be local ecotype seed but we need to expand our acreage and increase the number of wild populations we collect from to expand diversity in our seed plots. I would like to grow some more common but under-represented species like upland sedges and maybe some annuals like prairie ragwort or wild bean.

To be continued and probably edited…

Posted in Pollinator, prairie, restoration, seed cleaning, seed production, seed testing | Comments Off

Paris Climate Agreement

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Alison

Since the conclusion of the Paris Climate meeting, I have been thinking and reading about how the US will meet its obligation to lower CO2 emissions. A significant contribution could come from increasing the country’s forest canopy, especially in cities: Cities Need Trees. Numerous studies have documented the effects trees have on storing carbon, reducing pollution, ameliorating the urban heat island effect, and improving the well-being and health of people who live in cities. Trees must be considered part of an urban environment’s infrastructure, as essential as storm sewers, lighting, and sidewalks. Retrofits and future developments should include room for trees, accommodating their root and canopy needs when designing new parking lots, roads, and other developments. Growing the urban forest is an investment in community health and safety.

But we need to understand the context of our planting sites. As I discussed in one of my first blog posts (http://shoestringseed.com/blog3/2013/02/27/the-importance-of-knowing-where-you-are/) location and species selection are critical to success. My fear is that we will focus on the easy solution: “plant more trees!” to the detriment of less conspicuous species. Grassland birds are declining faster than any other category of avian species. This country has converted a greater percentage of prairie than any other native ecosystem. Shelterbelts planted adjacent to native grasslands may cause more harm than good especially if the species planted are aggressive or invasive as I have seen first hand. Prairies also sequester carbon especially in the soil. We are still discovering the life forms and nutrient cycles right under our feet. My hope is that agricultural policy will encourage the preservation of grasslands and potentially subsidize their restoration in areas poorly suited to cultivation. Forests and riparian areas also need to be restored not only to store carbon but also to buffer waterways from pollution, store floodwaters, and provide habitat in urban areas. Climate change presents an opportunity to restore ecosystems and build resilience back into our environment but it won’t be easy.

Posted in prairie, restoration, windbreaks | Comments Off

Pollinator Mix 2014

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Alison

This gallery contains 34 photos.

We will offer a pollinator mix later this year that should work in a range of conditions: compacted urban soils, hot spots in parking lots or boulevards, droughty sites with sandy or very well-drained soils, and even average garden soils. … Continue reading →

More Galleries | 3 Comments

Fire, some thoughts

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Alison

I watched the fire run up to our production plots and thought “this epitomizes my farm career: I can’t keep up.” Plums keep sprouting in new locations before the old thickets are brought under control. A controlled burn (really) last spring stimulated the brome rather than suppressing it. And now burning a small pile of brush turned into a six acre grassland fire as it raced through the lush brome and up into the plots, torching some cedar trees between them. I wanted to burn the plots but not exactly in this unplanned, ragged way. When the fire chief pulled up to me his first words were, “this is not what I expected when I gave you the permit.” It was a harbinger of things to come in our dry, windy, snow-free state. Grass fires have made the news every week including some that closed state roadways. (http://www.kptm.com/story/24552588/firefighters-battle-large-grassfire-west-of-yutan )

The white ash is what we intended to burn but the wind shifted out of the west and carried the blaze up to the plots.

Here are some things I know we learned (and discussed) after the fire got away from us:

Listen to your spouse when he/she warns you that you are rushing through preparations and you really don’t have to burn the pile today. To-do lists may be modified.
Never burn anything without water and the means to apply it.
Every fall mow out the area around the buildings and between the plots and the buildings.
Mow around the brush piles or move them to an area that can be mowed/disked.
Keep fire breaks maintained and expand the width of them.
Cut down all of the cedars between the plots
Wait for snow before burning brush piles – we may never get another permit.

And here is a list of what I wish to learn from the fire:

How will it affect the cheat grass growing in the plots?
How will it affect the seed I broadcast in the fall?
1. Blue and hairy grama on the south side of the big field
2. Little bluestem and big bluestem over seeded in the big field, and
3. Switchgrass in the small field that was completely over run by the fire.
How will the primrose rosettes that looked great last fall respond to fire?
The brome?!

The benefits of our uncontrolled burn include removal of thatch that was building up in the big bluestem plots and now we have a burned patch for grazing this spring. I’ll also be able to over-seed the south field with upland sedges. We’ve opened up the ground for quite a bit of seeding. Before then I’ll focus on harvesting rose hips and treating more plum thickets, no more brush fires, unless it snows.

Here’s a rough approximation of the area that burned.

Burned about 6 acres. Even the aerial looks dry!

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Cleaning milkweed seed

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Alison

As concern for monarch populations grows, so does the need for milkweed seed. I never thought we would harvest and clean common milkweed seed but there is a need that we can easily fill because it grows happily in our pasture. This is how we do it:

Harvest pods: I don’t even look at a milkweed plant until I see one of the pods fluffing out or opening. We gently pry the pod open a bit to see if the seed is brown. If so we pick it and let it dry in the open, on a tarp or in a shallow container. If the pod hasn’t opened on its own the seed can easily mold if left in a closed container, even if it’s paper.
Common milkweed seed drying on a tarp in the far back corner

Shucking? milkweed pods with a shop vac

2. After the milkweed has dried a week or so depending on your humidity, it should be ready to vacuum. We use a 5.5 hp shop vac but that doesn’t mean it’s the only one that will work. After vacuuming all the loose seed, I hold the pods of common milkweed and suck the seed out. Depending on the species of milkweed being cleaned, the pods swirling in the drum may damage the seed. It’s ok if a few pods fly up the hose but I don’t vacuum pods off the tarp.

Milkweed seed filaments attached to the vacuum filter and on top of seed in the bottom of the drum.

3. Depending on the vacuum’s capacity, it will need to be cleaned out when you hear the motor straining. It also varies with the number of pods sucked into the drum. The seed fluff will adhere to the filter and the seed will be in the bottom of the drum.

4. Always sweep or pull the filaments off the vacuum filter when emptying the drum. We have an old fashioned whisk broom to clean our vacuum filters but there may be better tools. Then I screen the seed to remove fluff and broken seed.

5. This may not be the best way to clean small lots of seed where you don’t want to damage any seed at all. My assumption is that some seed is immature and disintegrates in the shop vac. We have seed dedicated shop vacuums at the farm and at home because we have found they are very useful when cleaning seed attached to a pappus. Many of the asters fall into this category. It took about two hours to clean 15 gallons of pods from start to finish and we ended up with about a gallon of seed.

Swamp milkweed seed after vacuuming the pods, these do not damage the seed swirling inside the drum like common milkweed pods can.

screening seed after vacuuming: pods scalped off by coarse screen, broken bits fall through a fine screen

Posted in milkweed, seed cleaning | 2 Comments

More fodder for thoughts on plots

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Alison

Aha! Found this article on Science Daily (see text below if the link dies):
http://tinyurl.com/o23fspv

I have suspected that forbs and grasses should and can grow together in our plots. The trick is figuring out which ones work together the best for ease of harvest, weed suppression, and enhanced productivity. This is another reason to tolerate volunteer species. Some of the volunteers have been profitable (goldenrod!) and support wildlife (common ragweed) such as ground nesting birds and quail.

Looking at masses of vervain, black-eyed susan, and compass plant along with plenty of brome

fall view of seed plots: compass plant, side oats behind, and lots of miscellaneous volunteers: stiff goldenrod, false boneset, and vervain

“The experimental result from Marc William Cadotte confirms a prediction made by Charles Darwin in “On the Origin of Species”, first published in 1859. Darwin had said that a plot of land growing distantly related grasses would be more productive than a plot with a single species of grass.

Since then, many experiments have shown that multi-species plots are more productive. Cadotte’s experiment showed for the first time that species with the greatest evolutionary distance from one another have the greatest productivity gains.

“If you have two species that can access different resources or do things in different ways, then having those two species together can enhance species function. What I’ve done is account for those differences by accounting for their evolutionary history,” Cadotte says.

Cadotte grew 17 different plants in various combinations of one, two, or four species per plot. As in previous experiments, he found that multi-species plots produced more plant material. But when he analyzed the results he also found that combinations of plants that were distantly related to one another were more productive than combinations of plants that were closely related. So, for instance, a plot planted with goldenrod and the closely related black-eyed susan wasn’t as productive as a plot with goldenrod and the more distantly related bluestem grass.

What’s going on isn’t mysterious, Cadotte says. Distantly related plants are more likely to require different resources and to fill different environmental niches — one might need more nitrogen, the other more phosphorus; one might have shallow roots, the other deep roots. So rather than competing with one another they complement one another.

What’s interesting about his result is that evolutionary distance is all you need to know to predict productivity. The result suggests that as plant species disappear Earth will become less productive, and plants will draw even less carbon from the atmosphere, possibly increasing the rate of global warming.

On the other hand, the results could give a valuable tool to conservation efforts. Environmentalists trying to restore damaged habitats could use the information to help them pick which combinations of species to introduce.”

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Pasture Burn

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Alison

“You won’t get a permit if we don’t get some moisture,” the Clearwater Volunteer Fire Chief flatly informed me. It was the week before the seed conference, two weeks before we wanted to burn the pasture.

“I understand.” Heck, I agreed with him. The drought of 2012 hit our area very hard. The early 2013 spring rain and snow pelting Lincoln missed the farm – repeatedly. I prepared a prescribed burn plan and mailed it to him just before we left for the 2013 Native Seed conference. I guilted my sister into agreeing to help. I solicited no one else because I didn’t really believe it would rain or snow in our absence and that I was merely relieving my inner nag by “at least trying” to get a permit.

It rained while we were out of town. It rained enough that he asked how many ATV’s we would have onsite when we burned. How much water would we have available should something go wrong. Tentatively he gave his approval, but we would need the final say Friday from the assistant chief who also worked at the coop where we would get the water tanker we needed.

Condition of the pasture the evening before we started controlled burning

Carey and I stopped by the farm Thursday night and I took a picture of the SNOW on the ground. Based on the weather forecast Friday and Saturday I revised the plan to take advantage of the weather: Friday winds 12-18 mph out of the NW meant we should back burn along east and south disked breaks, Saturday 13-20 mph out of the SE meant we should back burn north and west and set a head fire up the north slopes. The assistant chief wasn’t too concerned about our plan. He did want to make sure we had enough water and filled the 200 gallon tank we borrowed from Pheasants Forever. We headed back to the farm loaded with tools and water.

I should probably mention that I have never conducted a prescribed burn before, though I have participated in a few. Carey has burned more brush piles than he can count but that isn’t quite the same thing. We mixed fuel for the drip torch, filled the backpack water sprayer, positioned the tractor and truck in strategic locations and headed to the south side to start igniting dry grass. The drip torch was new and took a little while to light. We lit a dry cedar branch with needles to provide the constant flame a match could not sustain. Off I went about 10′ off the disked fire break. The fire crept west along the furrow and also north into the wind.

Creeping back fire along east side

All day the fire edged slowly north and west (Carey dragged it with a rake) until we had to put it out around 7:30 pm. I had hoped it would make it all the way across the south side but we put it out in the last draw below the western-most slope.

Meanwhile I was setting black line on the east side but as I moved closer to the north windbreak simultaneously falling further below the hill to the west, the air started to swirl. I was almost at the end when I realized the creeping fire had jumped the draw and was headed up the slope. I called Carey. “I need help.” He stammered and mumbled. “Move the tractor!” I said into the phone and ran over to the truck and drove it into position to hose down the escaping fire. Trouble was I didn’t know how to start the pump so Carey had to come over and start it for me. Then I couldn’t get enough hose off the reel to reach the ascending flames moving away from me. Carey started disking the slope above the advancing flames (his way of moving the tractor) and I managed to smother the flames with the flapper as they hit the disked furrows. The fire also spread north and nearly ignited a pine stump but I hosed that out. We had it back under control in about 45 minutes and Carey returned to his fire on the south side. I put out some stray flames that crossed the disked break into the plots. It was a hectic hour. I don’t know that it would have done any harm had we let it run, but it was no longer under our control nor moving according to plan.

Carey’s creeping fire along the south side

I joined Carey on his side of the pasture making sure no flames crossed the large draw that feeds our dry pond. We agreed that we would put it out when the sun was just above the horizon. Around 7:30 pm we decided to put it out and finish Saturday. Around the same time a coyote howled nearby obviously displeased with the state of the pasture, almost a third of it black and smoking.

Smoldering earth

Saturday did not start well. My sister Kristin and her husband joined us and we replenished fuel for the drip torch (spilling some and sending my sister outside for fear we would blow up the building). We headed to the NW corner. Snow began to fall. I tried to set the back fire in the NW corner (wind out the SE). The brome did not want to burn. I kept going across the corner and then set off down the hill along the west side. Finally it started burning. No coincidence the wind picked up and the relative humidity dropped. Carey again dragged flames along the north side but couldn’t keep it going. Kristin and I headed south along the west side to the bottom of the draw and had a pretty good fire going. Finally the snow stopped and I headed east along the north break. Carey and Rob monitored the west side. The fire always smouldered out in the plum thickets: too damp, too little fuel.

Kristin monitoring the south side fire break

By 1 pm we had burned the backfires but the wind had increased to around 20 mph. We communicated by radio and decided to set a head fire halfway down the north side and let it run up the slope.

Head fire moving up north slope

About an hour later Mom and the grandkids arrived. I was a little nervous because I was going to light the last headfire to run up the north slope and made sure they stood “in the black” (an area already burned). Away it went and we were left with mop up detail and photographing the kids.

Lighting headfire

Esme and Guy, future fire crew members?

During mopup we discovered a smoldering cedar that had died in the 2005 fire but was still standing during this 2013 burn. It had been burning for a couple of hours I would guess when we took this picture:

Smoldering, dead cedar standing

The next day Carey and I burned a brush pile of thorny locust limbs and scraps from cutting trees down. It took a while but we finally got it going and ignited a honey locust stump that burned through the night.

Carey managing the brush pile

Burning stump

and one last shot of glowing embers.

We let the honey locust stump glow through the night because there was so little fuel left in the pasture.

I cannot express how happy and relieved I was after the burn was complete. And the pasture has exploded with new growth. Unfortunately much of it has been smooth brome. I think we burned a little too early to damage it. The Kentucky bluegrass has not rebounded as well. We need to burn our seed plots and see if that will suppress the resurgent brome.

Here’s a little clip of video Rob took: firemovie

Posted in controlled burn, general farm, prairie, restoration | Comments Off

Ramblings of a seed picker

Cleaning Wild Rose (hips)

New Production Plot

Porcupine Grass – Hesperostipa spartea

2017 Native Seed Conference

Paris Climate Agreement

Pollinator Mix 2014

Fire, some thoughts

Cleaning milkweed seed

More fodder for thoughts on plots

Pasture Burn

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