It has been quite a time of excitement for us lately here in Oregon. The past several weeks have been chock full of seed collection opportunities and other adventures. To start off, last Thursday my partner, Mason, and I found ourselves being evacuated from the top of Upper Table Rock due to a fire that started at the base of the mountain and was creeping toward us. We quickly gathered as much Fool’s Onion (Tritileia hyacinthina) seed as we could before hiking down the two mile trail with a sheriff’s department officer and three other hikers that unfortunately had just reached the top before finding out they had to turn around and immediately hike back down. By the time we reached the bottom, the fire had nearly spread to the top of Upper Table Rock, not far from where I had been standing looking down on the fire just 45 minutes prior.

This week my mentor, Doug Kendig, my partner, Mason London, and I embarked on a week-long tour of nurseries, seed farms, and seed processing facilities. We departed Medford, Oregon on Monday and headed toward Bend ready to deliver nine collections to the Bend Seed Extractory. Sarah and Kayla gave us an in depth tour of their operation, including demonstrations of some of the seed cleaning equipment, seed viability tests, and more. It was a great experience to actually see where our seed goes, what happens to it when it leaves our hands, and who spends their time and energy managing our seed. We left with a great appreciation for everything Sarah and Kayla do at the Bend Seed Extractory.

From there we headed north toward the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. After a short stop to examine the impressive exposed rock revealing millions of years of natural history, we continued our journey north. We later stopped at a quaint little town called Fossil, Oregon. While there, of course, we searched for fossils. There is a public fossil digging area behind Fossil High School. If anyone is ever passing through the area, I recommend the stop. Fossils that are anywhere between a million to thirty million years old can be found in the area.

We stopped for the night along the Columbia River before pressing on the next morning toward Moses Lake, WA, our northern most destination. Our first stop of the day Tuesday was at BFI Native Seed near Warden, Washington. BFI is a native seed increase farm that grows out source-verified grass and forb seed. It was an incredibly impressive and professional operation. Plants from all sorts of different biotypes were represented on this ~1700 acre farm. It was an opportunity to see how individuals of the same species that have become adapted to very different environments share different phenotypes. Seeing these very different expressions of the same species highlighted some of the difficulties of identifying forbs and grasses that we had encountered in the field.

After leaving BFI Native Seed we made a stop at Rainier Seed LLC, another seed growing operation that grows various sourced seed including natives. This farm consists of ~5000 acres in total, including all contracted farming operations tied to the company. We were lead through a variety of fields of different flowering and seeding plants that would soon be harvested and cleaned.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, June 25) we will be attending a restoration tour led by the owner of BFI Native Seed to see how these native plant seeds are used in restoration projects and what the final result can look like. We are quite excited to complete this ever expanding perspective of the native seed network by seeing examples of the seed actually in use for conservation or restoration purposes.

There is still a lot of touring and driving left before we make it back home to Medford on Friday. After leaving the Moses Lake area in Washington, we will be making our way to the Willamette Valley area in Oregon to stop by the Plant Materials Center in Corvallis, as well as possibly other seed farms or native plant nurseries along the way.

All in all it has been a very informative, interesting, and exciting couple of weeks for the Rogue Valley crew! If any of you have a chance to stop by the Bend Seed Extractory, I highly suggest it, as it really helped me to understand the greater system that we are apart of and how I can help make their jobs easier by making simple adjustments to my seed collecting techniques.

I hope everyone out there is doing well.

The stages from collection to cleaned seed

Seed cleaning demo

Searching for fossils in Fossil

Plant plugs and greenhouse at BFI Native Seed

Fields of Oregon Sunshine at BFI Native Seed

Finished clean seed

Seed processing equipment at Bend Seed Extractory

Sunday June 22nd, 2014- I turn 24 years old.

My life has changed more in these last two weeks of my 23rd year than they have in the past 200 before them. All the familiar comforts of home have been stripped away and replaced with a new bed, a new job, and a part of the country unlike any I have ever experienced. After leaving the Internship Workshop in Chicago, my mind was filled with questions and expectations about my new situation. After a week here, some of those questions have been answered, but most of them still remain. I have found my co-workers to be kind and helpful and my living situation comfortable, but exactly what it is I’m going to be doing here still seems to be up in the air. I have met with a number of my neighbors, but between moving in and starting work I haven’t had much time to really get to know anybody here in town. There is so much going on, it’s hard to keep up with it all.

But all these new experiences seem to pale beside the backdrop against which they take place. I am surrounded, at all times, by such… volume. To my immediate east looms Cedar Mountain and the Hurricane Cliffs, so close they make you crane your neck upward in search of the sky. North, south and west roll on for mile after mile after mile. When talking about the American West, my dad is fond of saying, “There’s a lot of there out there.”  I think I understand what he was talking about now. I can see Cedar Valley- the entire Cedar Valley- unfolding before me for forty miles or more, reaching to the horizon where it explodes upwards into the Wah Wah Mountains. Locals tell me that I’ll get used to the view before long, but for now I have learned to live with the sense of astonishment I feel every time I lift my eyes. Every other place I have lived suddenly seems so much smaller, and I wonder if I will find myself feeling cramped when I return to these places. I have been profoundly touched by this landscape, and the more I learn about it and its inhabitants, the more enchanted I become.

Nothing remains now but to learn as much as I can.