Help for conservation planting

With spring comes the desire to plant. If you are planning on planting property with an acre or more, you may want to purchase your plants from the Nevada Division of Forestry (NDF) Nursery. Each year the NDF Washoe Nursery grows specialty plants for conservation purposes and makes them available to the public.

The purpose of the nursery program is to provide technical assistance and native or adapted plant materials to encourage private landowners and public land management agencies to make conservation plantings for windbreaks, shelter belts, woodlots, erosion control or food and cover for wildlife. Seedlings offered by the NDF are graded and grown to sizes suitable for conservation plantings on private and public lands. Plants purchased at the nursery must be used only for conservation purposes as provided for by Nevada Revised Statutes 528.105. A minimum purchase of 25 plants is required.

Nursery prices are set by size of containers: supercells/4"pots - $1.50, 1-gallon pot - $3, D-pot container - $2.25, 2-gallon pot - $4.75 and T-pot container - $3.50. The nursery does not accept credit cards, only cash or checks. They request that you help them conserve resources as well as hold prices down by returning empty growing containers (4 inches and up) to the nursery. Although the plants come fairly small to begin with, they are hardy and genetically adapted to the harsh growing conditions of Northern Nevada. With proper irrigation they will outgrow many larger containerized planting stock.

Shrubs available include buffaloberry, chokecherry, cotoneaster, coyote willow, dogwood, lilac, sand cherry, and Wood's rose. Deciduous trees include black locust, bur oak, green ash, hackberry and honeylocust. Austrian pine, Baker cypress, Colorado blue spruce, eastern red cedar, incense cedar, and Scotch pine are a few of the evergreens you may purchase. The nursery even grows flowers such as blanket flower, blue flax, lupine and yarrow.

The NDF Washoe Nursery opens for plant sales May 13 and will close Oct. 16. The nursery hours are 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. Experts will be on site May 13-15 to answer questions about windbreak construction, pest and disease identification, fire-safe landscaping and general planting practices.

The nursery is located at 885 Eastlake Blvd. in Washoe Valley. For more information: 849-0213. You can check them out online at www.forestry.nv.gov.

• JoAnne Skelly is the Carson City/Storey County Extension educator for University of Nevada Cooperative Extension and may be reached at skellyj@unce.unr.edu or 887-2252.