One of the partner schools for our 10,000 Redwoods program is Marin Academy. Each year in January, teachers and students at the schools we’ve partnered with sow redwood seeds and care for the seedlings until the end of the school year.
This year the garden teacher, Gina Neri, offered to help us grow plants for our Tocaloma floodplain restoration project. The SPAWN Nursery is completely filled with plants ready for outplanting this winter, but we can always use more grass plugs and other ground covers! We want to come as close as we can to 100% native vegetation coverage so that invasive species have less of a chance to become established on the site.
On a Sunday morning in late September, freshman students and their families participated in service activities for many local non-profits. One activity was helping us to sow seeds. We seeded eight species of native grasses as well as perennials such as Cow Parsnip (Heracleum maximum) and California Poppy (Eschscholzia californica). Together we were able to sow 1500 plugs in one morning!
In early October a group of seniors came together in their free time to seed out pollinator plants. These native annuals and perennials will be used in our restoration site and for a pollinator gardening workshop that will be held at SPAWN in February 2019. Some plants will stay behind to brighten the Marin Academy garden and attract bees to the fruit trees and veggie gardens.
We filled up the entire greenhouse with flats! And we were amazed at how quickly the grass seeds germinated and how much they grew in only ten days. The grasses will be ready to plant out in just a few months.
We want to say thank you to Marin Academy, and to all of our partner schools, for your help with growing plants for our restoration projects. We look forward to seeding redwoods with students this winter!
