[APWG] Annual Great Basin meeting, follows BLM path it already set?

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Wayne,

You wrote:
What would be the cost per pound?
Where would it come from?
What/which species?

My reply:
The planting project at http://www.ecoseeds.com/greatbasin.html show how
it could be done.  Local native seeds are hand collected and part of those
seeds used for planting out small scale test plots that are shown in the
photo.

The plots size does not need to be very big, the ones shown in the photo
were only one by two meters for each treatment.  A treatment means a
single species at a particular sowing rate.

We would sow at least a half dozen individual species using about ten
different sowing rates, to see for each species, what number of pounds per
acre they were most comfortable with to produce survivable seedlings.

In that area, the species were Great Basin wild rye, Poa, Bluebunch
wheatgrass, Squirreltail, and Thurber's Needlegrass.  For sandy sites, it
was Indian Rioegrass and Needle and Thread.

Those are native grass species that are widespread across the Basin, that
I found throughout my 3,000 mile mile-by-mile Megatransect in 1997 at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/megatransect.html and at the bottom of that web
page you can see the species and locations in Nevada, from Jackpot to
Wells.

Before you start any large-scale planting, you absolutely must get
successful test plots to work consistently, and work the bugs out, before
you take any next steps.

Like you have to find out, who is hungry for native seeds?  You need to
set out cupcake tins, with each cupcake spot filled with a different
native seed that you want to sow in an area, and leave it out and check it
daily to see what might be there that likes to eat native seeds.

In the Great Basin it was mice, and in the Mojave it was the native seed
harvester ants, and in the forests it might be quail and doves.

For example, seed harvesting mice within a few days dug up all of our
first sowings in the Great Basin just like little bulldoxers.

So we had to invent a way to disguise the scent of the seeds so they could
not easily find them in our test plots; and slightly increased the sowing
rate so that we could pay off the mice, and at the same time, get
seedlings for our plots.

Then, you need to take a portion of those locally collected seeds to a
local seed grower, and have your seeds grown under contract for several
years.  Because they are all perennial grasses, you should be able to get
a decade of harvests off of one planting.  And the seed will reproduce on
a 1 to 100 scale in one year.

This process of getting your own local native grass seed, should be
getting done each year, by every BLM district and every USFS forest and
every State highways landscaping group in the country.

No native grass seeds should ever be spot-purchased by any of these
agencies, instead they should be grown under contract from
customer-supplied seeds.   And these agencies should never purchase native
grass cultivars.

I taught hundreds of BLM and USFS personnel how to get their own local
native grass seeds, in California, western Oregon, western Washington,
northern Idaho, Colorado, South Dakota, etc. that you can see at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/classes.html.

I hope that there is interest for classes in Great Basin some day, when
BLM, the USFS and the Federal and state highways decide to kick the exotic
seed habit and convert to 100% local natives?  Like Boise, SLC, Reno, Las
Vegas, so we can place a bet on the future of native seeds?

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333