by Courtney Murphy | June 2020
The passage of time is confusing for a lot of us right now, but let’s try to do some mental time travel. Can you remember what you were doing six months ago?
If you are a Nisqually Land Trust volunteer or staff member, you were likely planting live stakes!
Last winter was the first time I encountered a live stake. I didn’t plant any during the 2018-2019 planting season, and though I’d heard people talk about them and seen evidence (in the form of surviving live stakes planted in years past), they seemed somewhat mythical. When I took the truck to pick up the first round of live stakes from Sound Native Plants and saw several bundles of sticks waiting for me, I wasn’t entirely convinced they would become plants.
Live stakes are branches that are harvested from mature hardwood trees and shrubs while they are dormant during the winter. Usually, live stakes are planted along stream banks and in wetland areas. The stakes we planted last winter—black cottonwood, Pacific willow, and Sitka willow—were three feet long and cut diagonally on one end. The goal is to insert the sharp end into the ground so only half the stake protrudes. The nodes underground become roots, and the nodes above ground grow leaves and eventually, branches. Species that do well as live stakes have naturally high levels of the plant rooting hormone indolebutyric acid (IBA).
In practice, planting live stakes feels a bit silly, like you’re just shoving a stick into the ground. If the soil is wet enough, you are sometimes able to push the stake deep enough without a tool. If the soil is too compacted, you can use a tool that looks like a pogo stick made of rebar (known as a dibble bar) to make a pilot hole, and then drive the stake in with a mallet. We planted 1450 native trees using this method last winter.
Last week I went to check the growth of our live stakes, and was delighted to see that they are thriving throughout the watershed!
This willow at the Mashel River Protected Area was planted several years ago as a live stake. Hopefully, the live stakes we planted last winter will continue to thrive and look like this in a few years!
Thanks to the rain this spring, the sites at Lackamas Flats and Van Eaton are wetter than when we planted them. Even in the Lower Ohop north of Peterson Road, where it was difficult to plant even with the pogo sticks due to compacted soil, they are shooting out leaves and new growth like crazy.
At Brighton Creek the reed canary grass is taller than me, but the live stakes don’t seem to care. They’re on their way to growing taller than the grass, so they can eventually reach the sunlight and shade it out.