The Riparian Lands crew has been out scouting and collecting seeds as part of our direct seeding project with Vermont Fish and Wildlife. Species we have been focusing on this spring include: quaking aspen, bigtooth aspen, balsam poplar, eastern cottonwood, black willow, shrub willow, silver maple, red maple, and American elm. Over the past couple months, the crew has been scouting out locations for potential collection sites and gathering data on the different tree and shrub species. Observations on weather, flowering dates, seed formation, and other notes have been collected for future reference.
Last week, the crew was out collecting shrub willow seeds. Seeds were collected on Wednesday (May 18th), 15 hours later (Thursday morning) it began fluffing up in our drying racks, and were processed by the crew by Friday morning.
Species found in the Salicaceae family disperse their seed via this cottony fluff that gets caught in the wind. We’ve figured out a good method for cleaning this fluff from the remaining pods, stems, and bits of twigs that may have been collected with the use of a shop vac and cloth rag. We’re currently looking into methods of cleaning the seed from the fluff for more effective distribution with the hydroseeder.
Unfortunately, the unseasonably hot weather and back-to-back thunderstorms this past month may have hurt our chances of collecting quaking aspen (one of our first collection species). Sites we have been keeping a close eye on over the month have released a lot of their pods, seemingly overnight and before the seeds were fully matured. Our first collection of aspen (on May 11th) showed signs of maturing (the fluff was beginning to poke out of individual pods), but it didn’t fluff up in our drying racks – this false maturation may have been caused by other factors (fungus, insects, the weather…etc). We try and collect the pods just as they’re about to open and release seeds. This gives us our best chance at collecting the most amount of seeds off of a tree. Our second round of aspen collection (collected on May 19th) had much better results, but was collected as most of the pods had opened up and had released many of the seeds already.
For more information or if you’re interested in assisting with finding potential collection sites, please reach out to Jess Colby at jess@northwoodscenter.org