The staff at Nasami Farm has been diligently working at the nursery all winter.  The greenhouses are packed to the gills with resting plants; fat-budded and ready to burst in spring.  The white, winterizing polyethylene film keeps them nice and cool through the winter.

The focus has now turned to seeds.  Even though we are taking the year off from the Society’s seed sale program, seed still needed to be collected and processed for use in the nursery.  It was an awful summer for agricultural crops with blights and rots, but our natives produced a bumper crop of seeds.

Provenance has been the primary objective in this year’s collection activities.  We have added nearly 60 species to our “wild collected seed” repertoire.  Most of these are from healthy, vibrant populations in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont and New Hampshire.  The offspring produced from these collections will be grown at the nursery and used as seed sources for our future production, with the goal of having all New England native species no more than one generation removed from “wild type.”  

Many “natives” found at nurseries are produced in distant regions like the Carolinas or Pacific Northwest, with unknown origins.  A plant with New England genetics will be more winter-hardy and robust than those of a more modest climatic conditioning.

Our dedicated volunteers have been spending hours cleaning seeds; squishing berries for the fleshy fruits, rubbing the fuzzy seeds like the asters and goldenrods with a rubber glove on a car floor mat or passing them through a series of test sieves to separate the seed from the chaff.  Fern spores are especially fun requiring much gentle tapping on paper to separate the dust-like spores from the dust-like frond debris. 

Some of our volunteers will happily devote an entire day to seed-cleaning, being enamored with the diversity of pods, fruits, and seed shapes.  The dissecting microscope usually elicits many “oohs and aahs” when the microscopic details of these shapely seeds come into focus.  Some of those especially lucky ones got to enjoy the delicious fruit on paw paw (Asimina triloba) cleaning day.

We are always looking for volunteers to help with nursery activities.  If anyone is interested in participating in our therapeutic seed-cleaning activities, please contact Kate Pawling at (413) 397-9922.