What a spring this hasn’t been. March 27 and it’s snowing (again)! Still, plant life continues, as hundreds of thousands of new seedlings are appearing. For many species we sowed flats of seeds in the fall and winter so they could get the requisite chilling they needed prior to germination in the spring. One of these sown […]
Archives for March 2012
The oak of Central Washington
There is but one species of oak native to Washington state, Oregon white oak or Garry oak (Quercus garryana). It grows west of the Cascades from Vancouver Island to California, but occurs east of the mountains only in Yakima and Klickitat counties… except for a fairly small population found between Cle Elum and Ellensburg, separated […]
My favorite fungi – mycorrhizae
When I started growing native plants I was unaware of how important a certain class of soil fungi were to the growth and even survival of most species. Mycorrhizae (myco for fungi, rhizae for roots) grow in association with the roots of over 95% of the world’s plants, basically serving as “root extenders”. They can […]
The first seedlings pop up
It never ceases to thrill me; the snow begins to retreat from the seeded containers and there they are, the first seedlings of 2012! The first to appear are the species from the driest habitats, particularly the shrub-steppe: balsamroot, silky lupine, several species of buckwheats, big sagebrush. These drought-adapted species may only have their cotyledons […]