NJ Tea Seed Collection
Yesterday, my mom, brother, and I went to Albany Pine Bush to collect some seeds! It was a great experience and time went by quickly as we were collecting.
First, we drove over to a small abandoned house to pick up some supplies. Yes, it did seem kind of sketchy, but they had a lot of really high-quality supplies, like gloves, garden shovels, and other equipment that was hidden under boxes of other supplies. We then drove over to a seed collection area that I selected and began looking for NJ Tea seeds.
One thing about seed collection is that it starts off very slowly. The seeds are extremely small, which may seem obvious, but the leaves of many different plants also look very similar. This makes identifying seeds much harder, especially because you are forced to look for the seeds themselves instead of relying on easier identification methods.
Some of you may be wondering, well, why not look at the flowers? New Jersey Tea flowers are white and should stand out pretty clearly against all the green around them. The thing is, once the seeds start developing, the flowers disappear. So, when you actually find white New Jersey Tea flowers, the seeds either cannot be seen yet or are not ripe enough to collect!
However, after a while, it became easier to find and collect New Jersey Tea despite these difficulties. I found that the leaves are more oval-shaped with jagged edges. I had looked this up before, but seeing what they actually looked like in real life made identifying them much more consistent. Looking more closely at each individual plant also helped me find the seeds.
In the end, we collected around 0.4 pounds of seeds, which may not seem like a lot, but in reality, it is actually a pretty good amount. Overall, I thought seed collecting was a really interesting experience because it was much more hands-on than simply learning how to identify plants from pictures. You have to pay attention to small details, compare different plants, and make decisions about whether the seeds are actually ready to collect. It was definitely difficult at first, but once I started recognizing New Jersey Tea more consistently, the process became much more enjoyable. I also liked knowing that the seeds we collected could eventually be used to help restore and maintain the Pine Bush habitat.
