Summer 2021 Newsletter

AMLT Begins Large Scale Plant Propagation for Coastal Prairie Stewardship at Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve

By Rob Cuthrell, PhD, AMLT Research Associate

Those of you who have followed AMLT’s work over the last few years are likely familiar with our efforts to return Indigenous-based stewardship to the landscape at Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve in Año Nuevo State Park. Since 2018, in partnership with State Parks and the San Mateo County Resource Conservation District, AMLT’s Native Stewardship Corps has been working to remove encroaching woody vegetation – particularly Douglas fir trees and shrublands – that have been taking over areas which were covered by coastal prairies maintained by Quiroste people for a thousand years or more before European colonization.

The coastal prairies of Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties are home to a wide variety of plants that don’t occur outside of California. Many native species have been severely diminished by invasion of exotic invasive plants, such as annual grasses and agricultural weeds. Today, it is difficult to find coastal prairies that still host diverse and robust populations of native plants. Coastal prairies are also critical to the diets of Indigenous peoples of California. They provide greens, seed foods, and bulbs from late winter to early fall, as well as supporting healthy populations of grazers and foragers. 

One of AMLT’s stewardship goals at Quiroste Valley is to replace woody vegetation that is removed with a diversity of patches and mosaics of local native coastal prairie plants. In 2019, in partnership with State Parks and Pie Ranch (a non-profit organic farm on Año Nuevo Point), AMLT applied for and was awarded $400,000 in Prop 68 Cultural, Community, and Natural Resources Grant funding by the California Natural Resource Agency. Among other types of stewardship work, the bulk of this funding will support propagation of native plants for coastal prairie enhancement at Quiroste Valley. 

This project represents Amah Mutsun Tribal Band’s first opportunity to engage in native plant propagation work on a large scale, and all of us who were involved in designing the project were eager to begin this important work. Our goal for plant propagation is to produce 90,000 plant “plugs” (seedlings) that will be planted in an agricultural setting to produce seeds to sow at Quiroste Valley, as well as 30,000 plugs that will be planted directly at Quiroste Valley in areas where woody plants have been removed. The location for our propagation work is Cascade Ranch, a historic farm leased by Pie Ranch, which has generously provided AMLT with greenhouse and field space to support this project. 

Our original plan was to initiate this project in early 2020. We purchased hundreds of seed trays, and in February of last year the Native Stewards began filling them with dry soil and locally collected native plant seeds, with plans to set up a greenhouse and germinate all the seeds soon afterward. Then, in March, the COVID pandemic and its lockdowns put our plans on hold for months. As the year progressed into summer and the Native Stewardship Corps came back into operation, we finished filling up the 360 seed trays (about 45,000 plugs) that would be needed to fill the greenhouse and built tables to support them. 

Soon after, the August CZU Lightning Complex fires burned through parts of Pie Ranch and Cascade Ranch. Tragically, several historic buildings were lost, including Pie Ranch’s office building and Cascade Ranch outbuildings. The fire also knocked out electricity and water lines to the historic farm house at Cascade that the Native Stewardship Corps was using as its local headquarters, and created hazardous conditions on site which prevented the Stewardship Corps from being able to use the facilities afterward.

After six months of difficult post-fire recovery, in late February of 2021 Pie Ranch and AMLT completed assembly of a large hoop house at Cascade Ranch to support the native plant propagation work. At last, the Native Stewards moved the tables they had built into the greenhouse, covered them with seed trays (containing seeds that had been waiting to germinate for many months), and watered everything well. Remarkably, many of the plants germinated vigorously, and within a month the greenhouse was filled with seedlings of over a dozen native grasses and forbs.

However, serious challenges remained for the project. Due to impacts from COVID and wildfires, the Native Stewardship Corps wasn’t going to be able to spend as much time working on the project in the months after its initiation as we had hoped, as the crew had to work on other projects that had tighter deadlines. Knowing that we would need help from others, we put out a call for volunteers who would be willing to contribute at least eight hours per month helping out with the plant propagation work at Cascade Ranch. The response to this request was overwhelming, with over 140 people applying to be a member of our Cascade Plant Propagation Volunteer Team. In late April, we invited about 30 people to join the Volunteer Team. Since then, team members have been working diligently to plant out native plants, prepare seed trays, split apart and transplant seedlings, weed the field beds, and keep everything well-watered. 

Altogether, the Volunteer Team and other one-time volunteers contributed over 400 hours of work to the project during the month of May alone, and since the beginning of the project we have produced over 60,000 seedling plugs and planted out about 20,000 native plants for seed increase! Without the amazing support of our volunteers, this project would be in poor shape, but now we are well on our way to getting back on track and meeting our project goals. The Native Stewardship Corps will be able to join in the plant propagation work starting in early July, which will further accelerate our efforts. 

In selecting which plants to cultivate for this project, we focused primarily on native plants that were already relatively common in coastal prairies at Quiroste Valley, many of which also have traditional uses for food, medicine, or crafting. Examples include California brome grass (Bromus carinatus), blue wild rye (Elymus glaucus), and coast tarweed (Madia sativa), all of which are traditional seed foods for Native peoples of the Central California Coast. We are also working on expanding populations of species that our historical and archaeological research suggests used to be commonly used by Quiroste people for food, but which are uncommon on the landscape today. An example of one such plant is red maids (Calandrinia menziesii), which Amah Mutsun healer and Tribal leader Ascencion Solorsano described as one of her favorite seed foods in documents from the early 1900s. 

Although we have encountered many challenges in getting our plant propagation work off the ground, AMLT is committed to its responsibility to steward coastal prairies at Quiroste Valley, ensuring that the diversity of native plants which Quiroste people established and maintained there for untold generations will continue to have a home for generations to come. We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to our project partners and to our wonderful volunteers. Without your support, this important work to revitalize Indigenous-based stewardship and to support native plants in coastal prairies would not have been possible!