TUI Winter 2022 Newsletter & Impact Report

Author: Stasie Maxwell

Date: December 20th, 2022

The Understory Initiative’s winter 2022 newsletter and impact report. This report highlights our accomplishments in 2022, the impacts we’re having on understory habitats and local communities.

Download: TUI Winter 2022 Newsletter & Impact Report (.pdf; 15.5 MB)

RNPP / TUI Seed Production Business Plan

Title: RNPP | TUI Seed Production Business Plan

Date: September 2021

This business plan was developed to help land managers appropriately plan their future seeding efforts both in terms of time management and seed-cost projections by taking into account the full life cycle of seed production. We hope this business plan will also help local farmers have realistic expectations about seed pricing and production timelines. 

Author: Kathryn Prive

Download: RNPP | TUI Seed Production Business Plan (1MB)

Native Plant Grower Profile: Holly Mills

Holly Mills is one of the local wholesale growers providing plants for RNPP’s native plant sale this spring. Her background is in organic vegetable gardening but she made the transition to native plant production for restoration projects a few years back under the guidance of James Kraemer of Silver Springs Nursery.

Below is a video interview we did with her about why she enjoys working with native plants and some of her tips on how to select the right species for your property.

 

Contact Holly

Upper Table Rock Seed Blitz and Yellow Starthistle Pulls

June 2017 – June 2019

For the third year in a row, volunteers with The Nature Conservancy and the Rogue Native Plant Partnership gathered on the slopes of Upper Table Rock to collect wildflower seed for future restoration projects and hand pull the highly invasive yellow starthistle.

Yellow starthistle (Centaurea solstitialis) is an exotic annual herbaceous plant in the knapweed genus. The seeds from this plant can germinate whenever there is enough moisture in the soil. It starts as a small bluish green rosette and grows slowly through the winter months. Once the heat of the summer comes this plant bolts to produce yellow flowers subtended by thorny spikes.

Although yellow starthistle is an annual species that dies every year, it is able to produce a long taproot that depletes the soil of moisture making it nearly impossible for native species to grow nearby. This species is particularly difficult to manage because it can continue to produce flowers and seeds even after continual mowing or grazing by producing flowers very low to the ground. At Upper Table Rocks, years of volunteer-based hand-pulling has resulted in the almost complete eradication of this plant from the wildflower meadows at the site!

Ecological restoration involves many steps. The first step is often to change the disturbance patterns at the site (in this case stop the yellow starthistle invasion) followed by seeding the site with native wildflower and grass seeds. These precious seeds are hard to come by and expensive in Southern Oregon. To help tackle these challenges, volunteers with The Rogue Native Plant Partnership help to collect wildflower and grass seeds from native plants nearby. Once enough seed has been collected, it will either be used directly on the site or grown out at a nearby farm (increased) if more seed is needed than can reasonably be collected from wild plants.

AUTHOR:

Kathryn Prive
Rogue Native Plant Partnership

 

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Oregon Flora Plant Atlas

Author: Oregon Flora Project Dept. Botany & Plant Pathology, Oregon State University (various authors)

The Oregon Plant Atlas allows the user to generate customized plant distribution maps from herbarium specimen and observation data. The default search results displayed are “Flora vouchers”, specimens from the OSU Herbarium and selected vouchers from other herbaria. These serve as reference material for the upcoming Flora of Oregon. Any combination of available specimens or unvouchered observations can be mapped by selecting the appropriate checkboxes.

Visit (website): Oregon Flora Plant Atlas