Hi, my name is Kathleen Sievers, and I'm a vegetation intern at Rocky Mountain National Park.
Today I'll be showing you around the greenhouse,
give you a little tour of our facilities,
and introduce you to some native plant species that we've been working with.
It's April right now, and as you can see there's snow on the ground,
so we're working inside preparing for later in the season when we can do
our revegetation projects.
Right now, I'm working on transplanting a species
called Deschampsia cespitosa, which as you can see is a grass, and what I need
to do here is separate each individual blade of grass with its roots and put it
in its own cone with soil so later these plants will go directly into the ground.
We plant the majority of our plants from seed, and the seed can often be several
years old, but it's okay because it's been refrigerated. And once sown these
seeds can take up to a couple weeks to grow to where they're big enough to transplant.
During the germination process, we might use heat mats to speed
up this growth process as well.
Now, it takes several months from when the seeds
are sown to when they actually get in the ground, and in the meantime we're
working on transplanting a lot of different species simultaneously.
This week it's been a lot of grassesâmembers of the Poaceae familyâbut we've also got
a lot of plants that are sedges. Some in the buckwheat family, and some in the
Asteraceae family.
In fact these right here are hairy golden aster or Heterotheca villosas.
You've probably seen or heard of them before, but they are
actually getting too big, so we will space these out today or tomorrow to
give them more room to grow.
Now, there are some other plants around here that are getting a little bit too big and unruly,
so what I did with these Koeleria macranthas was I just snipped off the last couple of inchesâ
âgave them a little haircut.
Like the Deschampsia these grow in bunches or tufts,
and they're part of the Poaceae or grass family.
We will use both of those species to restore destabilized sites
both down in the headquarters area and up in the alpine regions.
So anyway, I hope you enjoyed this real brief tour of the greenhouse.
If you're considering an at-home haircut, maybe do better than I did.
Anyway, take care. I'll see you in a couple of weeks.
I gotta leave buddy!