Sage Hill gets a Sign and 70 new native plants!

By Kayla Patel and Polly Kirsch

This was an exciting week for the biodiversity team as we’ve started to see our plans and ideas become real. The Green Initiative Fund approved our proposal for funding so that we can finally have a sign to designate Sage Hill as a natural area. We are so thankful to them and excited to start designing a sign featuring the beautiful native fauna and historical significance of the natives of California.

To balance out all the time spent writing and proposing our ideas for funding, we also got our hands dirty gardening a few times. The plants we’ve been keeping in the nursery were doing well enough for us to transplant them, so we prepared plots and got the plants in the ground. Preparing the plots around Sage Hill was basically an afternoon spent weeding. With good weather and great company, we quickly made seven plots scattered around the slopes of Sage Hill, each about 3 meters by 3 meters. We left the plots alone for a few days for them to get some light rain and settle the soil. Then we came back with Professor Gillespie on Monday and started the transplants. We put ten Encelia Californica into a plot by digging small holes, stabilizing the new transplant, and giving it a healthy water. We tagged each with a little blue tape to designate it as a native species. Mochi and Belinda also joined us and we got to show them a little bit around the area we’re becoming so familiar with.