Entries categorized as ‘Vols & Hours’
Well, it almost didn’t happen, but it turned out to be a great morning on the trail.
Hadn’t heard from anyone as of last night, but this morning I found an email from Brian Bassler. I scrambled to get a bucket of tools and head over. Brian, his son, and Larry Hodak were there, already scouting things out and picking up trash. Brian’s wife and daughters joined us soon after.
We all walked the trail together. Larry pointed out lots of different plants. Cathy and the girls gathered and scattered columbine seeds. We pulled some grape vines off some shrubs and tried to reroute them in new directions. The park crew had done a lot of trimming of grasses and other things overgrowing the trail and we opened a few spots that were missed or already regrown. In the middle of the trail, we found two huge (one 12″ and one bigger) branches fallen. Luckily landing just off the trail, cuz they’re too big to move without cutting into pieces. We cut some of the cow parsnip that was just ready for seed gathering and knocked a bunch of that seed around the area opened (to sun) by the falling.
We discovered at least two and perhaps as many as six areas where the park crew had sprayed herbicide to clear small patches, each not more than two square yards. When we scheduled this day, we thought we might have a chance to plant new patches of natives in these areas. Probably the crews will finish these up. If we can get some advanced notice, we might be able to get a few community members out there to do it. (see Trail Management Plan.)
We picked up what seemed like not too much trash along the way. Making a complete pass, south to north. Larry pointed out and named all kinds of flowers, shrubs, and trees along the way. On the walk back south we fixed as best we could a broken spot in the fence.
One woman stopped to say thanks. Turns out she lives in the condos nearby. Hoping to see her and her neighbors out at future trail days.
Total volunteers: 7. Total hours: 21.
Categories: Trail Days · Vols & Hours
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
Well, the huge team of Lukie Marriott and I gathered at the trail about 9am last Saturday. We started at the north end and scoured the full length south to Lawrence and then back the other side of the trail, picking up trash, pulling garlic mustard and thistle and bindweed, and noticing that there seems to be more wild parsnip popping up this year than last.
We only found garlic mustard in scattered spots, though there is a big chunk of the west side of the trail where all the garlic mustard was little shoots off of bigger roots. We didn’t have proper tools, so there we couldn’t get the bigger roots. Next time! …as they are sure to make themselves noticeable again. The tall, thick patch that the Lab School kids pulled a couple of weeks ago, on the far southwest edge of the park (just north of the trees and bushes) looked totally clear. No new flowering.
Lots of columbine blooming, some other teeny tiny white clustered flowers, and many things we couldn’t identify. And the weather was perfect. We were finished before it got too hot. I walked home through the park proper, catching last bits of trash. Hopefully a really clean park discouraged some would-be litterers over the long weekend.
Next trail day sometime later in June. Stay tuned here for details. OR… join our mailing list for email alerts.
Total volunteers: 2. Total hours: 6.
Categories: Plants · Trail Days · Vols & Hours
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
