Too many people assume restoration of our forests, meadows and streams is something you can buy off-the-shelf at Walmart.
Oh, you want a wildflower meadow? Surely all you need to do is buy a can of it on the internet, and voila, we have it all back again. Just heat and serve, like it was a tin of baked beans. But the canned approach often does more harm than good – introducing invasive plants and genetics that can undermine the very communities we claim to save.
One of the biggest impediments to restoration efforts in Alabama is that we simply don’t have the most important ingredient – the seed. Sure you can find seed of native plants from Minnesota, California, Texas…but those plants are often just as alien to Alabama as plants from Europe or China. They often fail to thrive in our conditions, and even when they do, they can threaten the complex interactions of other plants, insects or animals around them.
That’s why, when we realized how important it was to restore shortleaf pine – the cornerstone of the South’s once immense shortleaf pine savannas – we knew we had to start with the seed. No one had collected shortleaf seed in Alabama in almost a century, and all the shortleaf seed being used for restoration here came from well west of the Mississippi River. Rather than restoring Alabama shortleaf pine, those western seeds undermine its future.
But as we learned, there’s more to seed than just collecting it. You have to figure out how to get it out of the fruit or cone that carries it – without losing it all together. You have to clip off the excess and separate the living kernel from the trash that comes with it. And then you’ve got to prove to the big growers that your seed is as pure and ready to germinate as any seed on the market.
Much to our delight, Robert Gandy, an esteemed seed collector with an impressive work history, found himself coming out of retirement to help with the endeavor we have embarked on at Paint Rock— to produce healthy, native shortleaf pine trees. Gandy got his start working with the Peace Corps in Central America, and went on to be recognized as one of the top seed procurers for the forest industry in the southeast.
Using his experience, Robert designed our seed processing equipment almost from scratch. When something didn’t work, he rebuilt it until it did. Pieces of those early trial runs are still in our garage – but they’re so cool, we don’t want to get rid of them.
For our 2022 seed harvest, Robert created a machine that would help dry out and open up the cones. Each batch of cones can take days to dry properly, and it takes quite a bit of baby-sitting to make sure the cones are ready to give up all their seed. Once dry and fully open, the cones are shaken and spun vigorously in another machine. The collected seeds have their wings clipped with another device (we don’t want them to fly away, obviously). And then they get their last shakedown and cleaning in a century old seed cleaner called the Clipper, which Robert acquired years ago and offered to the Research Center. It’s such a large and impressive set-up, Robert felt it best to operate it from the garage of his house in Gardendale, which basically meant that Robert did most or all of the seed cleaning work in the first year, producing almost half a million seed.
But this year, we made the big move to Paint Rock, and some of you might have seen the equipment on display at our open house in November. Robert worked closely with our research team leader, Joao Pedro de Godoy, to make sure he knew all the nuances of operating the machinery, and Joao has already successfully processed several bushels of cones.
Robert is always improving on his design, and with our bumper crop of seed this year, he decided we needed to make some significant upgrades. So the mastermind has brought forth a new contraption meant to more efficiently separate the seeds from the wings, speeding up this lengthy stage of the restoration procedure.
Robert’s newest gadget fits in well with the Steampunk theme of our seed operation. It’s a bright orange cement mixer that has been modified to toss the seeds until the wings break off. They then go to the Clipper, which neatly separates any remaining excess material from the PLS (Pure Live Seed) leaving us with just what we need: usable seeds for planting.
Robert doesn’t cut corners, and neither do we when it comes to restoring Alabama ecosystems.
Sakora Smeby and Bill Finch