Joaquin Ocana (Kaqchikel Peoples), Native Plant Nursery Coordinator
The last few weeks at the farm have been some of the busiest and most exciting of the year. With all the support and hard work from our team of interns and volunteers, we have succeeded in expanding our native plant nursery and are caring for and growing almost 2000 plants! Now that our interns have completed their Fall TEK Internship and shared their final presentations, we can still enjoy their recordings produced by Sam, our film producer. You can view the recordings with their accomplishments below.
Sam Eubanks
Madeline Butler
Ariana Villafuerte
We missed our opportunity to record Intern Tonya Heslett, but we still treasure our time with her this summer and fall. She added so much to our team with her maturity and indigenous perspectives.
Two of our interns stayed on to help us with our work in December. Thanks, Sam and Madeline! With their help we are now starting to germinate some of the native pollinators being added to ten additional recessed growing beds our Summer Interns constructed last summer. Thanks to the amazing support of our friend Mara Friddle, Farm Manager at the Institute for Applied Ecology, we finalized the list of plants that we will grow so we can fulfill our native habitat restoration goals in both urban and rural areas of the Mid-Willamette Valley.
Our team and interns learned to clean, weigh and store the seeds in our seed bank, and discussed their germination periods and processes that are necessary for each species we plan to grow. It was exciting to learn more about our seed choices and their natural life cycles. We factored in the flowering times and conditions for germination, and so many variables that make each unique. I am learning how complicated those conditions are and how much we still have yet to learn and observe.
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