You may have noticed that there is a bunch of fluff floating around in the air right now. This is because quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) is currently sending out seeds, and many other species in the Salicaceae family – such as shrub willow (Salix spp.), balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera), bigtooth aspen (Populus grandidentata), and eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides) – are about to follow suit. All of these species release millions of seeds surrounded by tufts of long, soft, white hairs annually that are carried along in the wind to be dispersed across the landscape to wherever conditions are favorable for germination – think bare earth and wet soils.

The Riparian Lands Crew has been busy checking known seed trees and anxiously waiting for the collection to begin here in the Northeast Kingdom! Many species in this family are dioecious – meaning individual trees are either male or female. Throughout much of the month of April, the crew was out learning how to identify the female trees, carefully recording when they began to flower and when they began to form seed pods. This past month they’ve been out watching for when the pods began to fluff out. Thankfully, seeding doesn’t happen all at once, and we’re able to get a little bit of a head start (about a week or so) by traveling over to the Champlain Valley to collect. At the start of the month, we traveled over to Burlington to meet up with the State Seed Coordinator (based out of the Intervale Conservation Nursery) to collect quaking aspen from Little Otter Creek WMA in Ferrisburg. The following week we were up collecting aspen at Eagle Point WMA in Derby. As we wrap up the month of May, we’re looking towards collecting shrub willow, balsam poplar, and eastern cottonwood.

In previous years, we have stored seeds from these species encapsulated in their fluff in ziploc bags in the freezer. This didn’t seem to negatively affect their germination rates but made using the seeds difficult when applying them onto riparian restoration sites with the hydroseeder. Back in March, we spoke to a horticulturist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Iowa to learn about how they process seeds for long-term storage, and now that we have some fluffy spring seeds ready, we finally get to test their methods on our own seeds! By using an air compressor, a large, round plastic container, a shop vac, and metal seed cleaning sieves, we have been able to separate the tiny seeds from the fluff! This will make storage much easier and allow us to more efficiently use our collections in the hydroseeder in the upcoming year.