Yes, the North Carolina Seeds of Success team is still making seed collections! This week, we travelled to Virginia to check out some National Wildlife Refuges on the coast. We visited four sites: Mackay Island NWR, Eastern Shore of Virginia NWR, Mason Neck NWR, and Occoquan Bay NWR. All four sites had species on our target species list! We ended up making seven collections total over the course of three days.

Cornus amomum (“silky dogwood”) berries

We’ve started finding some species we have yet seen in the locations we’ve visited thus far. One such species was Cornus amomum. Unfortunately, C. amomum fruits only contain one seed per fruit, so it was a challenge for us to get upwards of 10,000 seeds, the minimum number of seeds we need for each collection we make. Luckily, we found a big patch of C. amomum along a roadside at Occoquan Bay, and we were able to collect approximately 10,000 seeds in the course of just 45 minutes. Pretty impressive. Some other collections we made included seeds of Cakile edentula, Mikania scandens, and Borrichia frutescens. We also found a large population of one of our favorite species (or at least one of my favorites), Asclepias syriaca, which we’re hoping to collect next time we’re in Virginia.

Cakile edentula (American searocket) seeds

Asclepias syriaca (common milkweed) is getting ready to collect. So exciting!

Emily showing off our collections. That’s only the ones from two weeks ago! Not including the seven we made this week. Woo!

So there you have it! Our collections are slowly building up. Now we just have to find time to clean and ship all the seeds between all of our traveling…

Until next time,

Maggie