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 bottles, [...]
Filed in Gabriola Island, trails No Responses yet
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 were [...]
Filed in Gabriola Island, native plants 2 Comments so far
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 Gabriola forest?
Filed in Gabriola Island, native plants No Responses yet
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 as he [...]
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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 harvesting [...]
Filed in Gabriola Island, native plants No Responses yet
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 bands [...]
Filed in native plants, trails 8 Comments so far
