Along the basalt crescent formation in the northeast quarter of the Olympic Peninsula, where alpine cushion plant meadows give way to jagged cliffs, grows Olympic milkvetch, Astragalus australis var. cottonii (also called Cotton’s milkvetch). Its blue-green compound leaves held on pink stems, while distinctive, surprisingly blend into the dark gray shale and basalt substrate. Its fruits, however, are easy to spot, as a raceme of white and lavender-smudged flowers yields deep red, inflated pods. 

by Aisling Doyle Wade, UW Farm Production Manager
Later this month, the farm team will be beginning construction on a project that is long in the making, a perimeter fence around our Center for Urban Horticulture (CUH) site. 
In the 2024 season, the farm team experienced an escalation of a relatively new challenge – a growing population of urban deer eating farm crops! 

By Aisling Doyle Wade, UW Farm Production Manager
UW Farm CSA Shares On Sale Now!
Our crop plan is complete. Our seeds are neatly organized and tucked away in the cooler. In the greenhouse, we have already filled nearly all our allotted space with early flowers, alliums, brassicas and sprouting sweet potatoes! 

The UW Farm crew, with volunteers and students, have mowed much of the cover crop that grew extra thick and tall across the farm in the unseasonably warm weather. 

Learn more about one of the species in our Magnolia collection, Magnolia tamaulipana!

Learn all about Osmanthus heterophyllus, a fragrant, fall-blooming shrub!

At first glance, Decaisnea insignis isn’t a particularly striking shrub; growing between 10-15 feet high, its pinnately compound leaves arch away from the thick, central branches of the plant. It flowers in June, with long strings of dangling greenish flowers that can be hard to notice, blending with the yellows and greens of the rest of the plant.
What does make you look twice at this plant, though, are the fruits that ripen in the fall between September and early November: thick, blueish bean-like pods dangle where the flowers were, giving this plant its common names: Dead Man’s Fingers, or Blue Bean Tree. 

 
The weekend of June 5th-8th, 14 Rare Care volunteers traveled to the Okanogan Highlands in the Tonasket Ranger District of the Colville National Forest and surrounding Bureau of Land Management land for our annual Monitoring Weekend. Almost every person found and surveyed our target species for the weekend – northern blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium septentrionale). Six of the ten populations surveyed were larger in size than reported in the 90’s, some 10-100 times larger. 

We expected this survey season to be difficult with a hot and dry spring and summer causing shorter and earlier windows for finding rare plants. However, our volunteers, ever dedicated to the cause, rose to the challenge.
Sarah Stolar knew success would require arduous effort to reach a fern-leaf goldthread (Coptis aspleniifolia) population after Rare Care’s last three attempts couldn’t reach the location. 

Along the rutted road to Colockum Creek Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC), remnant patches of 7-foot-tall big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) give a glimpse of what the ACEC might have looked like before
recent wildfires. Today, most of the site is covered by a near-monoculture of nonnative cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) and tumble mustard (Sisymbrium altissimum) because the site has burned three times since 2013. 

Jacob Maki was Rare Care’s 2025 seasonal field technician. Maki started as a volunteer monitor with Rare Care in 2021. After graduating with a degree in plant biology from the University of Washington last year, he decided to take a stab at a full season of Rare Care.
Assisting with seed collections, outplantings, and monitoring, he traveled across the state from the Olympic Mountains to the basalt cliffs of the Columbia River, and even to channeled scablands in Odessa, WA.