The idea of restoration projects calls to mind cloudy Saturday mornings, spent with a volunteer crew pulling ivy or planting a row of leggy seedlings alongside a creekbed. A few hours working on a community service project, complete with a muffin, coffee and maybe a group photo at the day's conclusion.
For planners at Metro, working with a recently passed levy to create a five-year maintenance and restoration plan across the region's natural areas, the process is somewhat more in depth.
Depending on the conditions at any given site, one or two years of preparations, including plant surveys, seed collection and removing invasive species, can be necessary before the site is ready to be re-planted with native species.
On the scale with which Metro is working, ordering hundreds of thousands of plants per year, it requires some careful planning to make sure the right types and amounts of plants are the appropriate size when the time finally comes to get them in the ground.
Jonathan Soll, Metro's science and stewardship director, said that Metro is trying to put together plant orders for 2015 so people can collect the appropriate types and amounts of seed for plants that will be needed two years down the road.
On average, Metro orders about 300,000 bare root plants annually. In 2014, that number will be around 435,000, with the introduction of some levy-funded projects bumping up the numbers. As more levy projects are solidified, those numbers can be expected to increase.
But where are all these plants coming from?
According to Marsha Holt-Kingsley, Metro's native plant center coordinator, Metro is working with five growers in Oregon and Washington to assess which nurseries can grow which plants for what cost.
Metro is working on a proposal to growers to provide plants not only for the coming year, but a few down the road as well.
The proposal, called a grow-out contract, provides both Metro and the nurseries the agency is working with a measure of security – a guarantee of plants for Metro, and of revenue for the grower.
"(Ordering for) 2014 was easy. We know what we need, our planting projects all have implementation plans, there's a species list," Holt-Kingsley said. "Within a couple months we'll have 2015 defined, and 2016 by this time next year.
"We put the bids out there, the growers know we have these bids."
Mark Krautmann, owner of Heritage Seedlings Inc., said that early communication from agencies such as Metro planning long-term large-scale restoration projects is crucial.
"Few (nursery) firms will wildly speculate on growing natives by tens of thousands, since labor and materials costs are so high," Krautmann said in an email. "Many projects are large, and these are few in frequency. Thus almost no backup markets exist for native plants in the quantity of hundreds of thousands of plants if a project does not have secure funding on a schedule known a few years ahead of time."
Passage of the $10-million-per-year levy allows for Metro to make multi-year grow-out contracts with nurseries, rather than ordering on a seasonal basis.
Soll said that a recent influx of restoration funding up and down the entire Willamette Valley from various sources has spurred a multitude of large-scale planting projects, flooding the nursery industry with growing requests. This fact alone necessitates ordering years in advance to ensure the correct plants will be available when the time comes.
"It's a great time to be a native plant grower," Soll said. "But it makes our job more complicated."
Expanding on the benefits to growers, Soll added that, while Metro's contribution is not going to "revolutionize" the local nursery industry, it will certainly contribute to its growth.
"It's an extra pulse of fiscal certainty," Soll said. "Growers know they have this income, which frees them to say 'We can push the envelope on these other projects.'"
Sara Kral, owner of Scholl's Valley Native Nursery in Forest Grove, agreed that as a small business owner, it's nice to have a grow-out contract.
"Between the levy passing and large scale contracts we've had through other organizations, we've really seen the numbers grow," Kral said. "Which is exciting, because it means a lot of restoration is happening on the ground."
Because of the increase in business, Scholl's Valley has been able to hire two additional full-time local employees, and over the summer will be hiring a lot of local temporary help for weeding, Kral said.