Seeds and Fog

We had a few windy (for us) days and the sheer amount of redwood seed blown down onto the deck was really remarkable. In theory, you can gather these up and grow your own redwoods. Our property has two groves of redwoods, so we've already got plenty, thanks. But the redwoods are visibly quite stressed by the recent fire, the unusual changes in the weather, like years of drought, extreme and sustained heat waves, greatly reduced amounts and days of fog, etc. And that in turn results in more seeds being dispersed by the trees, pretty good planning there on the part of the trees, huh?

There is a special project within the USGS, The Pacific Coastal Fog Project, where they concentrate on monitoring and studying the changes in the fog along our coast that the plants that grow here are acclimated to. They're trying to model what to expect as far as fog amounts in the expected coming warming years.

I was joking the other day about how we're going to have to have county trucks going up and down the roads in all our redwood groves dispersing fog pretty soon just to keep the existing trees alive. I follow @KarlTheFog on twitter, which is a fun account that personifies the famous SF fog. We need one of those for the Santa Cruz Mountains.