For March 16th's field trip, our Advanced Digital Arts class met at the Rincon Reservation to take pictures, and plant some plants. I was a bit lost trying to find the Rincon Tribal Hall, mainly because the building itself was not marked as "Rincon Tribal Hall," but another name in their tribal language. Luckily, during my third pass of the building, I saw my professor standing in the parking lot, so I finally was able to park and join the rest of my classmates.
From the parking lot, we walked around the back of the Tribal Hall area and found a field of little trail of intertwining gravel paths, which divided the field into 4 different sections. Here, we met with our local guide/speaker, and she explained what we would be doing that afternoon. We students were split up into 4 different groups, and each group was assigned a group of plants, and an area to plant those plants. I was lucky enough to get assigned to the desert group, because there were not a lot of plants for assigned to our group. Do not get me wrong, I do enjoy plants and being outside, but only two days before I had had a manicure, and had totally forgotten to grab gloves at home. Needless to say, I was not too excited about doing some planting!
After grabbing our plants and retreating to our assigned area, we had to come up with a layout for where to plant the plants. To be completely honest, none of us were really sure where to put them, so we just came up with a few ideas for our oak trees (I believe we had 4 or 5 coastal oaks to plant), and then just put everything else away from the oaks. The problem with having so many oaks though was that we knew they were going to get tall, so we had to space them out. By spacing them out though, we knew that would create a lot of shade in our area. A lot of the other plants we had to plant were plants that require full sun, so who knows how well they will do once those oaks get really big.
With our plants plotted out, we got approval for our layout and started digging. I have to admit, the soil was pretty strange throughout our section. You would dig up soil at one part, and it would be regular soil, and then you would go 10-20 feet to the left to start on the next plant and you would be digging in sand! I guess it works for our "desert" team, but not knowing how each plant will respond to the soil types made me a little nervous.
Within about 20 minutes we had all of our plants planted! We then put our mulch down around the base of our plants and were ready for watering! Now this is where we all started to get a little frustrated. We were not given very much info or instruction on how to water our newly planted plants. They told us to try and find the end of our irrigating hoses (long black hoses with drip nozzles in them; they were already laid out in our field for some existing plants), but our hoses just continued on into the other fields, so we had no end to ours. After that, we got no further instruction on what to do (even after asking three times about what we needed to do for water), and after standing around doing nothing for 15 minutes we decided to just start helping other teams finish, in hopes that we could leave early. Of course, that did not happen, but I did stick around and help another team with irrigating their area.
At the end of the trip, I was dirty and ready to go home. It was interesting in the fact that I got a chance to plant plants I have never handled before, but overall, it was not as exciting as the Pechanga trip we had last week. Here are some more pictures from the trip:
Adina planting a plant for her team:
Mohave Yucca:
Our Lord's Candle:
Incensio:
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