Right now the island is so dry that much of the salal in the Gabriola woods is wilting. Really seriously wilting! I’ve never seen this much salal in distress before.
Filed in Gabriola Island,native plants,weather 2 Comments so far
Here’s what’s up in the Gabriola woods today. Wasps here. I wondered about a wasp nest fragment a while ago. Now I’ve found the rest of that nest, and can see that it fell out of a tree when a branch came down. So glad I wasn’t underneath when it fell! Wasps there. Last month [...]
Filed in Gabriola Island,insects Comments Off
I’m talking about people who come over on the Quinsam in the morning, pick a huge amount of salal in the Gabriola forest, load it all into a truck, and take it back to Nanaimo at the end of the day. They’re after the money, because they can sell salal to the floral industry. How [...]
Filed in environment,Gabriola Island 14 Comments so far
People who do things in the Gabriola woods often leave signs of their activity. What activity do you think this indicates? It’s a bunch of salal, tied up and affixed to some standing branches. Remembering the time when salal hanging in a tree led me to the salal thieves’ cache, I’m guessing that salal pickers [...]
Filed in Gabriola Island,native plants Comments Off
Where can I pick salal on Gabriola Island? Pickers come here to ask, so here is the answer. Dear salal pickers: do not come to Gabriola to pick salal. Most of Gabriola is private property, and you can’t just go into somebody’s yard and pick the salal there. People will call the police if you [...]
Gabriola’s salal berries are ripening, and this is a good thing for so many reasons. Some of them are: I like to eat salal berries. Yum! Dog likes to eat salal berries, too, and she picks her own. Watching her gently pull the berries off branches delights me. Lots of people don’t know salal berries [...]
Filed in food,Gabriola Island,native plants 6 Comments so far
It’s amazing how much litter there is in the Gabriola woods, and it’s not just along the trail, either: some of it’s under a dense thicket of salal. I know this because I bush-crash through the woods fairly regularly, and discover lots of stuff in the process. Under salal I find plastic water bottles, juice [...]
Filed in Gabriola Island,trails Comments Off
Things are never boring in the Gabriola woods. Today we spotted salal hanging from a tree. That led us to a massive cache of salal, all bundled and ready for sale to the floral industry in Nanaimo.This is just a small part of it: Then we saw Mr Salal Harvester himself, picking away. (!) There [...]
Well, well, well. What have we here? It’s a bunch of salal, held together with a rubber band — oddly enough, one just like the rubber bands I’ve been finding on forest trails recently. What do you suppose this bunch of salal is doing up in a tree like this, in the middle of the [...]
Filed in Gabriola Island,native plants Comments Off
Here’s a Seattle Times article on the salal-harvesting industry: A war in the woods. Son Chau and his wife were all alone and deep in the woods when a man shoved a pistol into their truck and said he was taking it all: 20,000 stems of a shrub called salal. Chau had spent the day [...]
Filed in native plants Comments Off
I’ve been reading up on salal harvesting lately, and on similar industries, too. The umbrella topic is non-timber forest products (NTFPs): everything other than trees that people take from the forest to sell. For us that means salal, mushrooms, medicinal plants, berries, and whatnot. One of the things I wonder about is the effect that [...]
Filed in Gabriola Island,native plants Comments Off
It’s a real-life Gabriola mystery! These are the clues: On a much-overgrown trail not far from a clearing, a rubber band lies on the ground. A brand new rubber band. The next day, there are four rubber bands in the same area. The day after that, nine. In the space of five days, thirty rubber [...]
Filed in native plants,trails 8 Comments so far
