Greenbelt Restoration Work Parties: January 15 to January 20, 2020

During Winter Quarter, January-March 2020, we have two groups of University of Washington students working with us in the Greenbelt. The first group, three Carlson Center Service-Learning students who are taking an Introduction to Community, Environment and Planning course, come on Wednesdays from 1:30-4:00. The second group consists of Capstone interns who are seniors majoring in Environmental Studies. They join the Service-Learning students at the Wednesday work parties and also work in the site on most Friday afternoons.

The first work party of Winter Quarter was held on January 15. In the days leading up to it, it became clear that weather was a potential problem. The Seattle Parks Department notified us that we were to cancel work parties if the temperature was below 32 degrees, if there was more than two inches of snow on the ground, or if more than half an inch of ground was frozen. We already had a policy of cancelling work parties if there are high winds. The chances of any or all of those criteria occurring was likely.

By the morning of the event, there was 1/2 – 1 inch of snow on the ground and the possibility of winds. We had expected 20-degree temperatures, but it had warmed up considerably. We decided to take it minute by minute. We would do a longer than normal orientation in my house and, if weather permitted, would take a tour of the site and do some restoration work afterwards.

Sarva and I led the orientation and the tour of the site. There wasn’t much time left afterwards and it was so cold that we decided not to start the restoration work that day. Still, we were off to a good start!

We gave the Capstone students responsibility for restoring a small section of the site and creating a planting plan for that area. The Capstone instructor also requires them to create a “deliverable” for the organization that is hosting them. Our students plan to create pamphlets about forest restoration that will be useful for future volunteers.

On Friday, January 17, the Capstone interns worked on their section of the site for the first time. They took down a drying rack where invasive plants like blackberry and ivy vines had been drying out for a year and moved the contents to a part of the site where dried debris is breaking down further. We will eventually plant in that composted debris.

After finishing moving the dried debris from the rack, the interns started digging out blackberry root balls and ivy from their section. I taught them what they needed to know to do those two jobs and then picked up trash from the site and the adjacent stairs, checking in with the students from time to time.

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In future sessions, as the interns finish removing invasive plants from their section of the site, they will spread wood chips over the newly cleared area to prevent soil erosion.

On January 20, we held our second annual Martin Luther King National Day of Service work party. Our team leaders were Maya, who is Forterra’s Green Cities Stewardship Coordinator, Shirley and me from GreenFriends, and Dave who is one of our regular team leaders.

Most of the volunteers were alumni from Western Washington University’s Huxley School of the Environment and their families. They were celebrating Huxley’s 50th anniversary. Others included our two UW Capstone interns, a family from the neighborhood where our site is located, a man who had signed up for event information on our GreenFriends information list during Amma’s last Seattle area visit, and several people who found us on Green Seattle Partnership’s event page.

After an orientation, we divided into four teams and started to work! Shirley and the neighborhood family picked up branches that had fallen on pathways during the last few months, weeded planting areas in the north part of the site and loosened up or replaced flagging tape on shrubs that had grown so much that it had become tight. (We use flagging tape of various colors to show what year a tree, shrub or ground cover was planted.)

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

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Maya’s group pruned a strip of shrubs and removed invasive blackberry and ivy vines along 25th Ave S. The shrubs had been planted years before we started our restoration project. They had grown big enough that in places they had become a thicket.

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Dave’s team worked in one of the few areas on the site where we hadn’t done much clearing in the past. It contained many forms of invasive shrubs and vines, primarily blackberry vines. Before the work party, I saw one blackberry vine that was at least 20 feet long.

At the beginning of the work session, several members of the group moved the contents of an old drying rack so that they would have a place to put their cuttings.

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My team removed the dried vines and weeds from one of the drying racks; looked for tagging tape that had gotten too tight and loosened or replaced it; and weeded several southern planting areas.

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After a snack break, all of the groups joined together to move wood chips from a pile on 25th Ave. S into smaller piles on our site. (Moving the wood chips onsite makes them much more accessible to members of future work parties.) We accomplished that task by forming a bucket brigade.

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Maya took two time-lapse videos of the bucket brigade. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I did. https://photos.app.goo.gl/W77onh6wwyBfWVN86 (Hover the cursor over the video to make it work. To make either of the videos fill the full page, click on the arrow.)

The three work parties between January 15 and January 20 were very different from each other, but each was productive and gave the participants a significant forest restoration experience.

Every volunteer who comes here contributes substantially to creating another healthy forest in Seattle.