Fall Planting/Seeding and our Newest Catalogue!

Written By: Francesca Claverie, Native Plant Nursery Manager

We are smack dab in the middle of fall, meaning you can either curl up with a hot beverage or plant and seed wild natives into your landscape. The Borderlands Restoration Native Plant Materials Program votes for the latter and set up a few wonderful options to help you do so. Our last plant/seed sale events of the year will be in Patagonia during the Fall Festival of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday October 12-14th from 10am-3pm and in Tucson on Saturday, November 3rd from 10am-2pm at The Garden Kitchen in south Tucson, AND we have a brand new native plant and seed catalogue available!

​We will have a smattering of trees, shrubs, forbs, and seed mixes available at the sales and if you’re interested in anything in particular, email us and we can be sure to bring them to you.  Fall is a fantastic time to plant and although it’s tough to compete with a rainy summer monsoon planting in the higher elevations of the Sky Islands, it’s arguably the most important time to plant in Tucson and some of the lower elevations.  Similarly to summer, mulching is critical to planting container plants in fall but instead of worrying so much about the ground desiccating, the mulch is also helpful for insulating the roots and base of the plant from the cold.  This year in particular is a great time for a fall planting to take advantage of these hurricane rains, although any new container plants should still be watered in and monitored for dryness.

​For seeding in the fall mulching is also of utmost importance, although you might not see many of the species germinate until the spring or summer monsoon season, depending on what kind of irrigation schedule, or lack thereof you implement.  A fall planting is a very natural time to seed since that’s when most of the seeds fall in the wild, although protecting them from predation is critical and mulching can protect seed from birds and insects while also letting them go through a natural cold stratification to improve germination of some species. 

​Lastly, we are thrilled to introduce you to our new catalogue.  There will be other posts and articles highlighting this newest publication, and thanks to the direction of our Seed Lab and Native Plant Materials Program manager, Allegra Mount, it looks better than ever.  The entire Native Plant Materials team worked hard to put this together and over one hundred native plant species are listed and described with beautiful photos and material type availability. The pdf of the catalogue is available online for free although it’s a hefty document to download.  We only printed a few full catalogues, and they’ll be around for viewing at any of our offices and sale locations, and have condensed versions of the catalogue available for free. If you’d like to purchase a full catalogue we also have some option available at our online store where you can buy a package deal of a bumper sticker, catalogue, and seed.  Check it out at borderlandsrestoration.org/online-store or email horticulture@borderlandsrestoration.org with questions or any orders.  Checkout some beautiful photos of the catalogue and our plants below: