By Mike Ingalls, Intervale Conservation Nursery Manager
Cozy in our offices during this snow, sleet, and windy weather, we’re thinking back to an incredible opportunity the Intervale Center received this fall. Our Conservation Nursery was awarded a $20,000 grant from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR). One of GMCR’s key funding focuses is water quality, which aligns directly with the nursery’s mission: restoring and conserving riparian zones to protect our waterways and Lake Champlain from agricultural runoff and pollution.
Thanks to this generous grant, we’ll be able to greatly increase the impact and sustainability of the Intervale Conservation Nursery. The grant supports three key fields: marketing, monitoring and partnership-building. We’ll be busy building connections with landowners, creating professional marketing materials, and developing a rigorous monitoring and evaluation tool to measure and report Nursery results over time, including species planted, number and location of projects, and miles of riverbanks, stream banks and lakeshore planted throughout Vermont.
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters employees partnered with Conservation Nursery staff to plant around 50 native trees and shrubs in Burlington's Intervale
Best of all, we’ve been able to implement two large riparian restoration projects along local watersheds — the first, a 1-day project, took place along the Winooski River in the Intervale. GMCR volunteers and Conservation Nursery staff planted over 50 container trees. The second planting project involves an estimated 700 trees and shrubs and will take place closer to GMCR’s headquarters in Waterbury.
What Does the Intervale Conservation Nursery Do?
We grow trees!
Until recently, bareroot trees and shrubs were available in large quantities to Northeastern clients mainly from nurseries west of the Mississippi River. While these plants were the correct species, their genotypes originated from western plant populations, raising serious concerns that these plants from milder West Coast climates lack the hardiness to survive in Vermont — and that non-native genetic material is compromising Vermont’s native plant communities.
The Intervale Conservation Nursery was established in 2002 to fill this gap by providing locally sourced native species of trees and shrubs for planting projects that restore stream and riverbank buffers, protect natural habitats and reduce phosphorus runoff.
Today, the Nursery grows native trees and shrubs for conservation projects statewide. Our plants are organically grown from seeds or cuttings collected by our staff from native wild populations throughout Vermont. Grown using only organic methods, our trees are hardy Vermont natives, genetically designed to withstand Vermont’s harsh winters.
The Intervale Conservation Nursery is a central component of the Intervale Center’s work, as healthy water is an integral part of healthy agriculture and a food system that’s good for people, animals, and the planet.
