Hello, welcome to the Slough Cast, the Elkhorn Slough Foundation podcast. Elkhorn Slough is one of California's last great coastal wetlands. We see Elkhorn Slough in its watershed protected forever, a working landscape where people, farming, industry, and nature thrive together. Here on the Slough Cast, we explore Elkhorn Slough together, build community, and share stories of the special place. Welcome!
Beem and Idols. We are back for another episode of Slough Cast. This episode is all about relationships. Well, technically, more about native plants, but we are going to be talking to Mary Paul and Khalifa Somosot who really took my relationship with native plants to another level. Native plants, what are they? Plants that have been here for millennia, that have a evolve with this place, that are in balance that live in community to create a healthy and
thriving ecosystem. I love native plants because they heal. They are in relationship with so many living beings, and as a person who loves community and is all about it and needs community, I just love plants, native plants, and those who work with them that are in relationship with native plants less nerd out. Anyway, if you didn't know about native plants, you're going to learn a little bit today.
Listo's, I'm an Oss. Hi everyone, my name is Mary, and I work here as the Stewardship Specialist for the Elkhorn Exil Reserve, and I started getting to know native plants when I first moved to California, which was about 17 years ago, and started working with them, and growing them, and restoring habitats with native plants in the Monterey Bay area.
Hi everyone, my name is Khalifa, and I am the Nursery Production Specialist. I started becoming more curious and aware of native plants when I moved to the Big Sur area about nine years ago, and I ended up taking a California Naturalist class at the PG Museum, and one
of the classes was about native plants, and we had this really cool botanist named Bruce Delgado, and we were just like, we were looking at the parts of a tidy tips plant with a loop, and I was like learning all these different parts, and then I knew I was in love, I was
like, I want to learn native plants, I'm going to like identify them all, and I'm going to learn all of their parts, and then I just started learning, I took the Horticulture Program at NPC, and discovered my love for nurturing plants. I was so curious, because I didn't even know where to start, like how do I know things are a plant is native or non-native, and it brought me back to a relationship, check this out.
When I started learning native plants, I didn't do it alone, so I think there's like a lot of places where you can go and participate in a guided hike, and we do them here too. So that helps a lot with either with your learning with someone, and you have a field guide, or you have someone leading a hike to help you identify that's one of the ways.
And then when I started getting better at identifying, like I could take the training wheels off kind of, I had my favorite book is the, I don't know if I'm saying it right, but the Monterrey County Field Guide of Wildflowers, and it has like all of the photos and descriptions and it's like color coded, so I started going on hikes on my own, and then I would just like take photos, I use eye naturalist, and I'd use the field guide book.
And then just going on hikes like all the time and just observing the environment and noticing the plants, and then starting to notice how they grow, like how they grow together, like what they look like together, and then I started noticing what plants were not native. One of the things that I realized was very similar is like in the beginning, I had a lot of botanist mentors who would like talk about all of the plants and how they grew in the wild.
And so when you started going on these hikes, you could see like how native plants behave differently because they're more working with all of these other species. So you can see lots of different species growing together, whereas when you see invasive species, they do take over an area and create kind of like monocultures in those areas. And so there's like a big difference with how they grow in relationship to each other.
So just like us, plants are building relationships too, and they kind of need each other in different ways. And so native plants are really good at working together and working cooperatively. And so you see them growing cooperatively for the most part. There are some natives that will behave more aggressively, but that's just like any being wanting to hold its own territory. You know, some plants take up more space than others, and that's just part of their personalities.
So you kind of get to know the plants and know their personalities and understand them better in that way. So just wanting to know that you are already, you know, starting that process. And you're building these relationships too. So it's like you get to know them more and more every time you see them, every time you're out hiking and every time you're working with them. I wanted to ask a question about the plants.
The native plants that like to take up space are those the ones we like in restoration? A lot of times yes. We want them to take up space. We want them to cover ground quickly so that invasive species don't have a chance to come up in those areas. Don't have a chance to establish. So we look for those personality traits, you know? Yes, plants take up your space. I'm so glad Mary brought up personalities. So I asked Mary, why are they so important?
Why are we putting thousands of plants into restoration sites? I feel like native plants are really important right now because they are so critical to helping restore and mitigate all of the impacts that we see on our landscape today, whether it's like water quality issues, whether it's erosion control, whether it's, you know, loss of habitat, these native plants, loss of pollinators even, you know, so these native plants have been in this landscape for millennia.
And so they have that adaptations. They have the skills. They have the personalities to really create a thriving landscape by bringing in pollinators, by helping to hold the soil in place, by helping to filter out excess nutrient in water. And so we really are learning more and more how important they are for just to create healthy ecosystems and healthy habitats. I know that all the plants that they're growing are from seed.
And actually the day I met Mary was the second day on the job collecting metal barley. That day we collected, I don't know, a bucket full, maybe a little less. A little less of metal barley. There was a group of about, I don't know, 10 volunteers, but I wanted to get a little bit more details of how do you do it? Where do you do it? One of the projects that we do here at the reserve is we started a native seed farm.
And the reason we started a native seed farm was because there weren't populations of native seed that were available in the quantities that we needed them for restoration projects. And so we knew we were going to be doing large-scale restoration projects of grassland species up at Hester Marsh.
And so we worked with the Elkorn Slue Foundation and used the property that they own to create a native seed farm, which is where we're farming native grass and native wildflower seeds to be able to collect them in the quantities that we would need them. And so this is not something that you would do like in wildland collections. So when we do wildland collections, which we still do, we are really, really careful to only collect 10% of the seed that is in that area.
So if you would look at one plant and there's 10 seeds on that plant, we would collect one seed off of that plant and then move on to the next plant. And so that's a way that you can keep most of the seed available for the wildlife that's using those plants as much as we are, even more than we are, and also making sure that there's always going to be seed in the seed bank.
So that individual, that species can survive into the next season and continue its life, you know, and the life of that species. So we're really, really careful about making sure we limit our wildland collection to 10%, which is what the standard is because you always want to leave more than you take. And that's just, you know, a general guideline, you know, leave the place better than you found it.
So some of the species that we grow in our native seed farm, one is our official state grass, stipopokra, which one I know you love. And so when we collect pounds and pounds of seed, it sounds like a lot. Like for example, this year, I think we collected about 30, some pounds were still weighing it out of seed, which took about eight weeks for our volunteer crew and our stewardship staff to like process and clean. But one pound of stipopokra seed has 80,000 seeds in it.
And so that's a lot of seed in just one pound. And so, you know, so we're able to collect huge amounts of seed. And now when you go out to our Hester Marsh Restoration site, the grassland, I mean, you'll see meadows of stipopokra. You'll see meadows of certain species that we've been able to grow out in our seed farm and then use on our restoration site. But seeds are so cool.
I think seeds are definitely beautiful, like when you're working with so many different kinds, you just start to appreciate how beautiful they are, like just even like aesthetically. And something that I started learning more about from working here at the Elkhorn Zoo is our native grasses and the seeds. I love it when Bill comes into the head house of the greenhouse and shares what seed he has.
And yeah, it's just like, I don't know, I'm just really happy to like look at seeds, talk about seeds, feel them, see the differences, learn the differences. I mentioned that I met Mary collecting seed just my second day on the job. And I'm out on the field thinking to myself, you spend a lot of time with yourself and you're collecting that seed. I'm reflecting thinking about my previous job, did I do the right thing? Is this where I'm supposed to be?
And while I'm collecting seed, a memory of my grandmother comes to me. It's almost like she came to visit me to tell me that you are where you're supposed to be. This memory is of my grandmother on the floor with the metate and she's separating corn, getting corn off the cob or getting it ready for it for the following year. And I remember different colors and just how she looked on the floor and how happy she was.
So it was a moment of, or it was just affirmation that I am where I'm supposed to be. And I think if I can sum this up, is that seeds could do that. Seeds could bring that ancestral memory, that ancestor, that relationship that we're also trying to have with ourselves. And I'll leave it at that. I asked if I want to deepen my relationship with native plants, or if I want to learn more, what resources are there out there? What's the next thing I need to do?
You can definitely find some stuff out on local native plant nurseries. But online, there's a lot of resources online on social media. I definitely learn a lot from Nick Hummingbird on Instagram and he has another account. His native plant account is California native plants and is just such a beneficial resource to anybody who cares about the land and native plants growing and tending native plants and collecting seeds.
I think the most important thing is like being observant of what's around you, you know, is paying more attention and seeing the plants that are around you is like, is always a really good place to be, you know, whether you're a beginner or like a professional, it's just like taking the time to make some observations and kind of seeing what's around you and acknowledging it and learning that there's like so much more to learn all the time. I always ask those weird questions, right?
I don't know if you've ever come to the Juan questions, but I ask what would plants say about you or to you? It was a beautiful conversation and the title of the episode Kate from it, so enjoy. They would definitely say I love you. They would say I love you, touch me. Butter me, feed me, and I want to stretch. I want to grow. I want to get out of here. That's what they say to me.
What they say about me, I think they would, yeah, no, I feel like they would tell me that they love me and that they're happy to see me. And I really believe that. I see it because the plants look amazing, so they're always happy to see you unlike me. When they're like, she's in charge of the sweet. And you know that's true. Well, they're tough. No, it's actually because they're tough, but I spoiled them. Yeah, that's what it is. They're totally tough. And I'm like, they're resilient.
But I do, I spoiled them. And when Khalifa first started working in the nursery, and I was like showing her the nursery and like kind of training her on how we grow things or whatever propagation, I was telling her like one thing I do is because I'm a tough nurturer for them. And I play samurai warriors music to them because I'm like, look, you got to be warriors out there. You got to, you got to, you're kind of in a battle. And I take you out there. I'm not going to come back.
You're on your own. And you're going to have all these weeds. And you're going to have to fight them. And you're going to know how to hold your ground. You got to know how to take up space. You got to know how to move in. And you know, you're going to have some territory issues. And you got to be prepared for that. They got a hard world. We're putting them out in hard places. You know, we're not putting them in a garden. We're not putting them in somebody's like plentier box.
They're going out into like, they're going toe to toe. They're going toe to toe in areas that have been just like really impacted by so many things and they got to just find their space. And they're going to have these weeds coming in. They feed them in. Yes. Stay strong. They got to learn that. That's why every plant no matter how they look gets love. Yes. There's no like one looks better than the other. They're all strong. They don't have their strengths that are needed in like the different.
And parts of where they'll go in right that diversity. Yeah. Yeah. Well that wraps up our episode about native plants, our relationships with them, where we're going. And I just got to give Mary and Kaleepai deep appreciations. You know, thank you for holding me for growing my love for native plants and deepening that relationship because it's made me a better, a better one, a better me. Another special shout out to Paola Martin, who is helping me through this journey of creating podcast.
The team is growing y'all. This is November, Native American Heritage Month. One thing we could all do is donate to our local tribe or tribes. Sponsor the work that they're doing to continue stewarding the land and being bright relationship. Right? Again, thank you all so very much for listening. If you have any questions, email me, Juanetalcornsloo.org. Follow us on social media. Alcornsloo Foundation. Check out our website for new events that are coming up alcornsloo.org. Take care. Nos vemos.
Adios