The hard work and patience of the Native Plant Nursery staff and volunteers has paid off, literally. A key plant for restoration sites, Hall's Aster plays an important role in providing late season nectar and pollen to bees. But propagating this precious plant doesn’t come easy, which is why it’s worth $1,000 a pound. This season, the Native Plant Nursery yielded 10 pounds, valued at $10,000!
Symphyotrichum hallii, aka Hall’s Aster is a native, summer flowering plant that lives in wetland prairies and floodplains across the Pacific Northwest. When there are few, if any, other plants flowering and young Queen bumblebees are trying to put on enough fat to survive winter hibernation, aster can provide for them.
Such a productive plant makes it an attractive candidate for our Native Plant Nursery to propagate, however, it’s not quite that easy. After a long bloom time, the seed is fluffy like a dandelion and blows away easily, making it difficult to collect.
Armed with shop vacuums, staff and volunteers went to work collecting seeds. Starting in late August, volunteers, interns and staff vacuumed the two raised beds, totaling 128 square feet, nearly every day for two months. Each bed, taking as much as three hours.
The Native Plant Nursery yielded 10 pounds of seeds, a record number for our nursery. Even more impressive is the limited space they were able to accomplish this feat in -128 square feet of raised beds. Our alternative seed source has yielded at most two pounds on 10,890 square feet.
When harvesting is almost complete, the plants are cut down, wrapped in remay cloth, then tied up in “burritos.” This year the Ecological Services team dispersed three "burritos" by hand throughout restoration sites with this technique.
The work that the Native Plant Nursery and nursery volunteers do is critical to establishing Hall’s Aster in our wetland restorations as well as for our pollinators.
