Tag Archives: seed

Persistence of Memory on the Prairie

Posted on by

The four co-interns I started with have ended their time at Midewin, leaving me with a whopping three weeks to complete all by my lonesome. I write this after the first week by myself, which was pretty good despite much less laughter and chatter.

With the boys gone and the harvest season drawing to a close, my main responsibility is to clean seed! It’s rather monotonous and dusty work, but satisfying in its own way. There is a gratifying finality in seeing months of hard work condensed into a Ziploc bag full of seed. Every bag of seed is a memory, too. It feels special to know that to anyone else in the world, they’re just bags of seed and nothing more. As if it had materialized spontaneously out of thin air. And to them, it might as well have. What difference would it make? But I can remember the day that we collected them, where we were and what we talked about.

I hope that the seeds we picked absorb some of our happy memories and maybe that will make them grow a little better. We’ll all go in different directions, maybe we’ll fall out of touch and we won’t know where we ended up. But I hope that the plants that grow from our seeds will somehow remember and store our memories for us so long as the prairie is still here.

My work for the next few weeks, bags and bags of seed to clean!
Cleaned, weighed seed in the cooler. Waiting to be put back out onto the prairie.

Logan and his very cute chaff snowman.

Processing seeds, processing thoughts

Posted on by
Our very first packet of processed seeds!

It finally snowed here in Marlinton, and all of the plant species on our list have officially gone to seed. We spent the past month driving north to collect from the tundra-esque Dolly Sods Wilderness and Spruce Knob, the highest points in the state. As we neared the end of October, our seed collection days shifted quickly from sunburnt, humid adventures to snowy and frigid races to the finish line. Last week at Dolly Sods, we alternated between collecting berries in sleet and jumping into the truck to blast heat on our wet-gloved hands. Collecting seed in cold weather at these higher elevations is an exhilarating experience and reminds me of late July in northern Alaska. The wind smells the same – of encroaching frost and decomposing leaves. There is overlap in foliage as well – caribou moss, stunted, leaning spruce trees and lots of lichen on bare rock. It’s quite amazing how the ecotone at high elevation bogs in West Virginia can bear resemblance to latitudes as far north as the tree line on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

Blending southern mountain cranberries before sifting out their tiny seeds

Between collection days, we clean our latest seedstock. It has been an honor to work with Morgan of Appalachian Headwaters, who has been teaching us proper technique for cleaning and storing specific seed types. We have been lucky enough to have access to the cleaning tools and facilities at Appalachian Headwaters, and we are ordering some more equipment for making the same use of our own miniature processing plant here in Marlinton.

I was surprised to find that seed cleaning is mostly intuitive and simply demands everyday resourcefulness. How do you remove cranberry seeds from all that berry pulp? Put electrical tape on the blades of an ordinary blender and chop it up, then filter it out through multiple sieves. How do you remove the outer layer of film from alternate-leafed dogwood? Rub it furiously on a screen and then pick it off with your nails. The whole process of cleaning is unexpectedly familiar, like working soil in a garden. With all that repeated movement, it’s easy to get in the zone and process your thoughts alongside the seeds as you pick seeds apart and wash away the pulp.

  • Heaps of seeds!

By the end of November, we will have finished up seed collection and will continue to process the seeds we’ve collected. Until next time!