If you’ve rafted the Moab Daily below Rocky Rapid or driven the River Road any time in the last decade or so, you’ve come within spitting distance of a native plant propagation center focused solely on the Colorado Plateau.
Mayberry orchard in 2010 when nearly all of the peach trees had died
Called the Mayberry Native Plant Propagation Center, the 30-acre property lies tucked between the Colorado River and the River Road just downstream of the Castle Valley turnoff. It is owned and operated by Rim to Rim Restoration, which will welcome the community to the property for its annual open house on Saturday, April 25.
Many Moab residents may know Rim to Rim Restoration for the nonprofit’s work in the Moab Valley’s creek corridors reducing fire fuels and improving the creeks’ ability to handle flood flows. In addition to this more visible work, however, Rim to Rim also focuses on plant propagation, including growing native plants for revegetation projects across the region.
What is plant propagation? Most people think of propagation as creating plants from seed or cuttings. Plant propagation also includes increasing the seed stock of a certain kind of plant. One way this can be accomplished is by cultivating many individual plants and repeatedly harvesting their seeds, which is a process called seed increase.
Successful propagation requires expertise in how target plants establish themselves, reproduce, and thrive. Rim to Rim focuses on propagating plants native to southeastern Utah for use in revegetation projects on public and private land.
Revegetation projects do best with plants that originate in the area, and the Mayberry Propagation Center provides a needed location to grow plants collected from the Colorado Plateau. Most plant propagation centers are run by the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and the closest ones lie in New Mexico, eastern Colorado, and Idaho, meaning Mayberry fills a needed gap by focusing solely and centrally on the Colorado Plateau.
This 30-acre parcel was originally part of 209 acres of land acquired in the 1960s by Moab’s Dr. Paul Mayberry and is the only portion of the total acreage that was farmed. In 1994 The Nature Conservancy (TNC) purchased the entire 209 acres and placed it in a conservation easement.
Aerial photo of the Mayberry property in fall 2023
Later, the land around what is now Mayberry was granted to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), meaning the 30 acres with Colorado River water rights is surrounded by public land. TNC still holds a conservation easement on Mayberry which limits activity to agricultural uses only.
When Rim to Rim acquired the property in 2009, all but eight of the 800 peach trees were dead, and the orchard abutted 14 acres of invasive Russian knapweed. Before work could begin to grow native plants, the trees had to be cleared and the knapweed killed. For several years Rim to Rim watered the knapweed to keep it healthy so that the plants would be able to absorb herbicide to kill them. Now there remains just a little knapweed outside the areas where high water events bring the seeds in from the river.
Constant vigilance by Rim to Rim staff now keeps knapweed and other weeds under control. Water for drip irrigation is provided by shallow wells that use the river bank as a cleaning filter. The property also features windbreaks, which double as seed “orchards” of regionally-sourced trees and shrubs and separate the property into one-acre fields. In these fields, Rim to Rim sows small quantities of locally-collected seed and grows out the plants to increase the seed available.
In addition to seed increase plots, Mayberry also hosts research plots supporting scientific studies. At the moment the property hosts a small “common garden” to investigate the viability of various native grass varieties popular in restoration projects. Common gardens are locations where plants from different populations are grown together to determine if differences between these plants are genetic or due to environmental influence. Other research at the property has included growing biocrusts for restoration purposes.
In the near future, Rim to Rim is interested in trialing methods for baling native grass “hay” for erosion control products that could be used during construction projects to hinder erosion while also introducing seed from hard-to-sow species like purple three awn, a bunchgrass.
You can learn about these projects and more at Rim to Rim’s annual Mayberry open house. This year, the open house will occur on Saturday, April 25 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the River Road mile marker 15.25.
The event will include self-guided and guided tours as well as kite-flying, socializing, a history talk, and more!
For more information check out the Rim to Rim Restoration website, www.revegetation.org, send a message to info@ revegetation.org, or call 435-259-6670.
And be sure to mention you read about Rim to Rim in Moab happenings.
