Greenbelt Restoration Work Party: July 29, 2018

In my last post, I shared how the lead up to the July 25th work party was full of challenges, ones that gave me the opportunity to practice behaviors such as flexibility, letting go, non-attachment, staying in the moment, equanimity, persistence and more. Thankfully, in my experience, times of challenge and learning are often followed by times that are relatively calm.

That was the case with the July 29th work party. By the morning of the event, we had three staff and fourteen participants registered. Most were students from a UW Environmental Science course.  I was elated when one of our other long-time team leaders showed up as well. Abundance was becoming the theme of this event!

As in the two previous work parties, the weather was hot, with temperatures in the high 80’s, so we still had to change the location of the work whenever the sun in a particular place got too hot. All of the areas were at least partially in the shade when we began.

After the orientation, we divided into four teams. One team finished clearing an area we had worked on in previous work parties, and then held a scavenger hunt, looking for bindweed, ivy and blackberry shoots. The members of that team dug out the invasive plants whenever and wherever they spotted them.

(Click on any of the galleries to enlarge the photos.)

The second team worked in an area where there was bindweed wrapping around most of the horsetails. Horsetails are delicate so it is close to impossible to remove the bindweed without damaging them. Many of the horsetails were already beginning to wither from being strangled by bindweed, the lack of rain, or perhaps it was just the end of the season for them… so we ended up removing most of them. That species has been around since before there were dinosaurs, so I have no doubt that they will return next year. This team also cleared blackberry plants, bindwood and horsetails from the border of the planting area, as long as that border wasn’t on a steep drop-off.

These photos were taken of this planting area on June 30 …

… and this is what the area looked like by the end of the July 29th work party.

The third team focused on two tasks. In 2016, the ground under two big cedar trees on the site was covered by a thick carpet of ivy vines. A volunteer had removed those vines in October of 2016 and stacked them in a pile. The vines had dried out long before the July 29, 2018 work party.

When we disassemble the drying racks that are scattered throughout the site, we usually put the contents on paths that we have lined with burlap bags. The debris usually consists of dried blackberry canes and small branches. When we walk on that type of debris, it crumbles. When we tried walking through the dried vines after scattering them at the previous work party, we found that our feet would get tangled in the vines. That clearly created a hazardous situation, so at the time we just put the vines back into a pile.

During the July 29th work party, two students used hand clippers to cut the vines into small pieces and then scattered the pieces on 120 square feet of burlap paths. These students didn’t make it to the bottom of the pile, but there isn’t much of it left. It will either be moved to the rack zone, which is an old house foundation that is full of invasive plants that are drying out, or will be cut up during a future work party.

Just prior to our break time these same students cut the bottom limbs of a bush in an area that has a lot of laurel. Laurel is not a native plant and is invasive.  In time, it will be removed from the site. Normally, we cut the bottom branches so that the Parks Department staff can easily see the trunks but since this bush had no central trunk and instead was a series of thin branches going up, we cut back the branches that were on the outside of the bush. (Perhaps there is a trunk somewhere in the bush, but I couldn’t find it.)

The fourth team worked in an area where we will be planting native trees, shrubs and ground covers in the fall. It had been cleared in the past, but there were many blackberry shoots that needed to be removed. The team also removed blackberry shoots and other weeds from nearby planting areas.

While the teams were working in our main site, my neighbor John cut back blackberry vines from a part of the Greenbelt that is north of the Hanford Stairs… and north of our primary site.

John and I had worked on several sections of that site in the spring. During this work party, he broke through the area he was clearing, into the section we had worked on before. I was so excited to see the two areas become one.

We took a snack break an hour-and-a-half into the three-hour work party. We provided special treats, watermelon and ice cream, since it was such a hot day!

After the break, all of the volunteers moved to the site north of the Hanford Stairs. There, everyone continued the process of clearing the land of the invasive blackberry vines and root balls, ivy, bindweed and other weeds.

We split into two groups. Three volunteers worked in a dense portion of the site that was 20-30 feet from the street. That section contains numerous evergreen trees were planted 10-15 years ago. Now, blackberry vines and ivy cover most of the trees and much of the ground.

The first photo below shows what one tree looked like before the July 25th work party and the other two show what the area looked like after the July 29th work party.

The majority of the volunteers worked on a section of the Greenbelt that is near the street.

On June 18 that area looked like this:

And here is a glimpse of what that same part looked like by the end of the July 29th work party:

The remaining time sped by. There is still much that needs to be done, but every area we had worked on looked dramatically different by the time we finished the work party. Step-by-step these sections of Seattle’s Greenbelt are once again becoming a healthy forest.