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mirrorred_starYesterday everyone who was at class was asked to take some seeds home to soak for a experimental planting at Limeburners' bay, at the boardwalk site. We have five or six different species of saltmarsh plants, and I got a Tecticornia species, either grey or blackseed glasswort.
The saltmarsh plants grow slowly and take years to recover areas that have been compacted by having people walking on them or riding bikes on them. The seeds of these plants need the area to be flooded before they germinate naturally, so we were asked to soak them and change the water a couple of times (or put them in a stocking in the top of the toilet, which I did because I have a pair of ankle ones), and then we put a couple of buckets of water on the areas we were going to plant in, after having raked them up to give the seeds more space to germinate in.
Having the seeds felt a bit like having flecks of gold- I didn't want to lose a single one, because any seed I lost could be one of the seeds that would germinate. And the seeds are tiny, about the size of poppy seeds.
So yeah, today maybe we helped accelerate the spread of the saltmarsh plants into these compacted areas. A good few hours' work.
*I like the name samphire, even if we haven't used it in class much. It's like a cross between the words sapphire and vampire. But not a sapphire vampire. That would just be weird.
The saltmarsh plants grow slowly and take years to recover areas that have been compacted by having people walking on them or riding bikes on them. The seeds of these plants need the area to be flooded before they germinate naturally, so we were asked to soak them and change the water a couple of times (or put them in a stocking in the top of the toilet, which I did because I have a pair of ankle ones), and then we put a couple of buckets of water on the areas we were going to plant in, after having raked them up to give the seeds more space to germinate in.
Having the seeds felt a bit like having flecks of gold- I didn't want to lose a single one, because any seed I lost could be one of the seeds that would germinate. And the seeds are tiny, about the size of poppy seeds.
So yeah, today maybe we helped accelerate the spread of the saltmarsh plants into these compacted areas. A good few hours' work.
*I like the name samphire, even if we haven't used it in class much. It's like a cross between the words sapphire and vampire. But not a sapphire vampire. That would just be weird.
