After about a month and a half of scouting out sites, meeting with landowners, and learning a LOT of plants, we finally completed our first seed collection this past Thursday! On Wednesday, we went to Harwichport on Cape Cod, to a 40+ acre backyard complete with a bog, some streams, some woods, and a large family of very protective ospreys right in the middle of prime collection area. Clearly they haven’t been filled in about our conservation efforts and still think that the five hippies tromping around the bog are trying to steal their babies…
Alas, nothing to be collected at this site yet. Many species will be ready here in about a week or two. We camped nearby, and Thursday morning went to a Mass Audubon site on the Cape called Longpasture. We made our way down to the saltmarsh, and spread out across the beach to test capsules of Juncus gerardii (commonly called black grass, although it is actually a sedge and not a grass at all). Sampling for ripeness mainly involves breaking open the capsules to reveal the tiny speck-sized seeds inside, and checking out the color. In this species, we are looking for dark brown to black seeds, whereas yellow to orange seeds are not yet ready.
The TINY specks surrounding the pile of capsules are the actual seeds – DON’T SNEEZE! Their dark brown/black color means they are ripe and ready for collection!
We spread out along the beach, and zig-zagged back and forth in our sections, collecting from every third or so plant. Once I go into a rhythm, it was really enjoyable and therapeutic. I didn’t make the connection until I was out in the field pulling up seed, but it’s the same summertime feel as going berry-picking – you just have to keep count (and we can’t eat them…) Needless to say, I am so happy to be doing this for the next five months!
The patches of the more brown-tinted grass-like plants are the Juncus gerardii. It is more of a high marsh species, hence it is not growing closer to the water. (Also, what a view!)
For each collection, we have three main protocols to keep in mind: 1. Collect from at least 50 individual plants, 2. Collect no more than 20% of the population, and 3. Collect at least 10,000 seeds. This seems like a large number of seeds, however each individual plant sends up a few stems with capsules, each stem has many capsules on it, and each capsule has many seeds inside. So after all the math was said and done, between the five of us we wound up with approximately 630,000 seeds. Go team go!
Bag full o’ seeds. First collection was quite a success!
Krista Heilmann
Seeds of Success Intern
New England Wild Flower Society, Framingham, MA