Nursery specializes in native plants
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Chokecherries, junipers, serviceberries, buffalo berries, Douglas fir — these are just a sample of the native plants and trees being grown in the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal greenhouses on old Highway 93 near the Division of Fire headquarters and in Ronan.
The Pablo greenhouse has a capacity of 824,000 tiny plants, depending on the container size, while the Ronan greenhouse can hold 400,000 seedlings. That’s a lot of soil, containers, water and beds.
Jean Matt, CSKT Forest Development Manager, describes the business as a nursery, although it also offers pre-commercial thinning and planting, everything from seed to final plantings, restoration, site preparation and custom growing. They even have special PVC tubes with photodegradable webbing, which is a cornstarch product for customers who want a greener way to plant.
The greenhouses are home to wildflowers, sedges, shrubs, rushes, deciduous trees, forbs and conifers.
Matt said they supply 5,000 sedges and rushes plants per year to Opportunity Ponds in Butte. They’ve also supplied plants for revegetation projects in Ravalli, Lake and Sanders counties. Now restoration is beginning on Milltown Dam, and Matt hopes the CSKT nursery can get some of that business.
Right now, one supervisor and four workers staff the greenhouse, but when the full crew is working the greenhouses employ 35 workers, all CSKT members — a fact Matt is proud of.
“We’re the best tribal program in the tribe,” he said.
But he explained that it’s hard, hard work to be employed at the nursery, because during the busiest time, they send 60,000 plants out twice a week.
And money the nursery makes is pumped back into it. They plan to install three more hoop houses with money they’ve made, Matt said.
When the Ronan greenhouses were built, from 1976-1978, the tribes raised conifers for themselves and other tribes in Montana. Now there’s not much money in conifers, so they’ve branched out into other Native plants and flowers. No other tribal greenhouse is even a quarter the size of the CSKT program, Matt said.
Construction started on the north greenhouses in 2001 and was completed in 2003. Each of the four bays has different soils, misting fans and grow lights.
The fourth bay was built with stimulus money, Matt said. Right now the bays are heated with “just the good Lord’s heat,” he said. Each bay holds eight beds, with 9,000 plants per bed, although workers are just starting the planting process.
Not only do they grow plants, Matt and his crew pick seeds each year, store seeds in a seed bank, clean seeds and scarify seeds — which means preparing them planting.
Some of the stratification is done by the birds and the bears, Matt said, since “through a belly is scarification. You find the best seeds in bear scat. Going through the (stomach) acid makes the seeds ready to plant.”
Some seeds stay viable for 25 years, Matt explained, so plants that are native to the Flathead reservation will be here forever.
Language is definitely part of the Salish and Kootenai culture but so are the plants, according to Matt. Camas, bitterroot, wild onion and chokecherries were some of the plants used for food, but many other plants were used for dyes and as medicines, “part of our sovereignty,” Matt said.
“We grow plants indigenous to this area, adapted to this area. No other nursery can say that,” Matt explained. “We have buffalo berries from west of the Continental Divide and east of the Divide.”
The nursery also includes shade houses at the Pablo site, where plants winter outside. During bitter cold, they put a heavy duty plastic covering on the greenhouse, and during the summer there is a shade cloth protecting the shrubs, trees an flowers.
About mid-April, Matt advocates putting the plants in the ground although he cautioned gardeners to remember that plants are like the kids in a fifth- grade class picture — some are tall and some are short, with some catching up to do.
