Entries categorized as ‘Trail Care’
Park District Volunteer Stewardship Coordinator, Becky Schillo, and Natural Areas Manager, Zhanna Yermakov, came out today and walked through the Park District’s management plan for the Ronan Park Trail area. Here are some of the highlights…
1. At the south entrance to the trail area, there is a big spread of low-growing sumac. It’s a fairly common landscape architecture feature, but it’s not making the most best welcome at the entrance. It’s to be replaced with more interesting mix of native shrubs.
2. From the south trailhead to the playground halfway north, a contractor crew will herbicide some small, 1-2 sq ft, areas of orchard grasses. These will be cleared and replanted with more interesting natives. The grasses were planted years ago, when it was originally hard to grow on the top part of the trail area, but now there is enough cover there to start mixing in other things.
3. Remove wire mesh and prune new shoots on trees near the playground. (Vols can do this.)
4. Trimming back things like roses and (very tall) cup plant along the south half of the fence line boundary.
5. Remove select invasive mulberry trees in favor of native oaks.
Along the way, we also noticed… indigo, rose, raspberry, wild onions, cup plant, rye grasses, sedges, golden alexander, solomon seal, cow parsnip, columbine.
Total Volunteers: 1. Total Hours: 2.
Categories: Plants · Trail Care · Vols & Hours
‘Tis the season. We’ve had two groups out already in this last week. And now our first community volunteers day on the trail… Saturday, May 23rd, 9AM to Noon or so. See the Volunteers page for details. And come join us on the trail!
Categories: Needed · Trail Care
Thanks to the Friends of the Chicago River and their 17th annual River Day. Volunteers worked on 60 different sites last Saturday. Ronan Park Nature Trail was one of those sites, and the trail is newly mulched as a result.
Categories: Trail Care
Tagged: Volunteers
A big thanks to the 120 students from the University of Chicago Lab School, for coming out this morning and picking up piles of trash and pulling out aggressively invasive garlic mustard flowers. Half of the group went on to River Park just north of Ronan, while half spread out, scanned and cleaned the whole of Ronan Park. When they reached the top of the park, they all came back along the river trail, picking trash and garlic mustard into bags.
Maybe it’s just early in the season, but there were only scatterings of garlic mustard flowers. One big patch of it in the park proper, southwest corner, in a low spot, near the west fenceline, just north of the grove of trees. That was knee high and thriving. We found one bigger patch between the trail and the river, almost at the very top of the trail, but much of that was less than 12″ tall. Then mostly only scatterings a few to a couple dozen plants, only here and there, along the rest of the trail. So maybe we’re still doing okay on that.
Total volunteers: 120. Total hours: 240.
Categories: Plants · Trail Care · Vols & Hours
I spent a little time entering emails and organizing our short but growing email list today. Made some phone calls to people for whom I had only a phone number.
Along the way, I got to chatting with one person who thought her work schedule would keep her from participating… but it turns out she was just out walking the trail and picked up a bunch of trash. Well, that counts as participating! Almost certainly somebody noticed her doing it, and now we have here, too.
If you’d like to be part of conversing and connecting and caring around the Trail, click the request link at the top of the sidebar, and I’ll add you to the list. Or just keep walking and quietly tending to what needs to be done around the Trail, whenever and however it’s easy for you!
Categories: Contact · Needed · Trail Care
Finally got out to transplant the last of the seedlings that have been incubating on my front porch since Kevin Anderson brought them to our first Trail Day. Found a nice spot for them in a flood-washed section and planted them with help from Lindsay and her small son Alex, who happened along the Trail at just the right time.
Categories: Trail Care
Last Trail Day was rained out. So I got to sleep in and listen to the rain. But now the Trail might disappear into the greenery again.
Becky Schillo at CPD has ordered us new tools, some shovels, gloves, trimming tools, for our very own. We will add more as we find more volunteers to use them.
We’re also working on setting up a Trail Day with a group of student volunteers, to install some (donated!) wood ties along edges of the Trail. Anybody else got a group that wants to do some light Trail maintenance work together?
Our next community trail (work/play) day is in August, TBA. Join our mailing list if you want to get that announcement and join us.
Still working on updates and corrections to the plants guide page, as well. Stay tuned.
Categories: Contact · Trail Care · Trail Days
Picked up two 5-gallon buckets of trash along the trail and along the new fence this afternoon. Probably not too bad a mess, after the 4th of July holiday.
Replaced 8 or so fence caps that had been pulled off, but apparently were too uninteresting to take with… or even throw away into the brush or the river. So we still have a full set, even if some are only set (no longer glued) into place.
Trimmed a good section of the north end of the trail where overgrowth had narrowed the trail. We need to do more pulling and trimming on the next Trail Day – Saturday July 19th – gather at 9AM.
Categories: Trail Care
