DECEMBER

Under the steady gaze of Long Branch’s stuffed wildlife, our volunteers continue to clean seed!

December 19: This Monday at Arlington County’s Long Branch Nature Center, 27 volunteers managed to clean over 15 pounds of our wild herb seed from a wide variety of species: three goldenrods (Solidago nemoralis, S. rugosa, and S. juncea), calico aster (Aster lateriflorus), white wood aster (Eurybia divaricata), round-leaved thoroughwort (Eupatorium rotundifolium), and giant sunflower (Helianthus giganteus). Fifteen pounds may not sound like much, but it’s actually an enormous amount, since many of those seeds are tiny. We used the Gary Putnam method of seed-cleaning. (See the notes for November 10 and 17.) Low-tech can be surprisingly effective! Once again, our volunteers came from the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists, and a local AmeriCorps contingent. We are very grateful to them all.

A strip of dead Eurasian fescue grass and Chinese lespedeza is exposed in Meadowood’s Big Meadow, as our volunteers fold solarization plastic.

December 4: Seven of us went out to Meadowood on Sunday to fold up all of the solarization plastic in the 17-acre “Big Meadow.” Solarization is a weed-control method. It’s pretty simple: during the growing season, you cover up a patch of weeds with heavy plastic. The plastic reduces the amount of water available to the weeds, eliminates light (if the plastic is opaque), and greatly increases the temperature to which the weeds are subjected. (The technique is usually employed only in full light.) Few plants can survive a bout of solarization, as our tests in the Big Meadow have showed. At Meadowood, we were especially interested in whether solarization could help us manage Chinese lespedeza (Lespedeza cuneata), a semi-woody, shrubby invasive alien plant that is a major pest in Meadowood’s fields. Our conclusions thus far: we can definitely kill the top-growth this way, and we can probably kill the roots, but we don’t yet know what effect, if any, solarization has on the seeds embedded in the soil. The biggest limitation of this method is likely to be cost; it’s probably just too expensive and cumbersome to apply on a large scale. (In the Big Meadow, we solarized about 10,000 square feet—enough to get a sense for what would be feasible.) But solarization would likely be helpful for managing smaller infestations—and in dealing with invasives, we need every tool that we can get! As for the Big Meadow, we’re working with our BLM colleagues on a more comprehensive plan for weed control, which we hope to start in late winter.

NOVEMBER

At Wakefield Park, volunteers working in a stand of broomsedge cut a clump of an invasive ornamental grass. (The invasive appears to be a species of Miscanthus.)

November 20: On Sunday, 16 of us gathered at Fairfax County’s Wakefield Park, to work in an “artificial natural area”: a big, steep slope that half surrounds a baseball field. The slope is artificial in the sense that it was bulldozed into its present shape when the ball field was built. But it is natural in the sense that something close to a native meadow is now covering most of it—and has largely displaced the alien fescue grasses that were originally sown on the slope. Currently, the slope is dominated by broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus), one of our most common native grasses. Other natives have found their way in here as well; for example, several species of goldenrod (Solidago spp.) are now well established. So the slope is testimony to a kind of natural resilience. Unfortunately, it is also testimony to the one of the Mid-Atlantic’s biggest ecological problems. You guessed it: invasive alien plants. We came out to do some invasives control—for example, we tried to cut as much Chinese lespedeza (L. cuneata) as possible. We also cut some natives, primarily brambles (Rubus spp.) and some tree seedlings, to interrupt succession to forest, and keep this little meadow intact. Our thanks to everyone who came out!

Volunteers clean the seed of various goldenrods, an important group of native meadow herbs.

November 17: Yet more threshing! (See the entry for November 10.) The volunteers are wearing masks, not because our seeds are a biohazard, but because all the fluffy, floaty stuff can be irritating to the throat. Today we did numerous feed-bags of goldenrod seed (Solidago spp., to the botanically inclined). Note here that Gary has introduced a refinement of his threshing apparatus: hardware-cloth screens on top of the bread-box things. Those white squares, made of PVC pipe, are the screen frames. Despite its name, hardware cloth is a wire net. The net openings are half-inch squares, a finer filter than the bread-box bottoms.

At the Fairlington Community Center in Arlington, volunteers threshed broomsedge, a native grass, for our meadow restoration work.

November 10: It’s not exactly as in the days of yore, but we seem to be developing our own communal threshing activity! (Key differences from the agrarian past: we’re reaping seed for wild plants, not domestic grains, and were doing it in suburbia.) This Thursday, volunteers from the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists and a local AmeriCorps contingent—15 people in all—gathered at the Fairlington Community Center in Arlington, to thresh broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus), an important native grass, for our meadow restoration efforts. We’re very grateful to ARMN’s Caroline Haynes for arranging the use of the Center. Our threshing procedure was worked out by another ARMN volunteer, Gary Putnam. Instructions: you put a sheaf of the grass on top of one of those upside-down supermarket bread-box things, then you beat the hell out of it with a bamboo stick. Instead of drifting off, the fluffy seed ends up trapped beneath the bread box. (Sometimes people cover the grass before hitting it.) As for the equipment, the bamboo, unfortunately, is readily available; there are several invasive bamboo species on the loose around here. The supermarket bread things are a rarity, but Gary has had great success in collecting them from grocery stores that have gone out of business. Gary is an ingenious and high-stamina tinkerer. (You can glimpse him in this photo; he’s in the blue shirt, middle row, second person in.) And while Gary has been collecting equipment, another of our ARMN colleagues, Rodney Olsen, has been rounding up volunteers. Rodney has been working with Lisa for more than a year now at this task and has greatly increased our outreach into Arlington. Our partnership with ARMN is clearly a seminal development for local conservation. We’ll be back at Fairlington in the days ahead, for more threshing.

Volunteers plant a variety of native forbs and grasses in Meadowood's Ecological Display Site.

November 6: At the BLM’s Meadowood property, 32 volunteers joined us this Sunday for a day of varied planting and meadow management. We worked mostly in our four-acre Ecological Display Site, where we installed a selection of native wetland shrubs and herbs in and around the new stormpond. The stormpond was finished just this year; it lies at the base of our River of Grass feature. At the top of the site, we put in a batch of redcedar (Juniperus virginiana)—a native evergreen tree that thrives in dry, sunny locations. Along the River of Grass, we planted various native herbs—goldenrods (Solidago spp.), for example, and wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia). All the plants came from our own Wild Plant Nursery. We also spent some time in the area that Lisa calls the “Dimple Meadow.” This lies near the Ecological Display Site and was once a gravel quarry—hence the “dimple.” It is now mostly covered with native grasses and herbs; it’s small—less than an acre—but it’s probably the best dry meadow on the property. We’re trying to keep it intact so we occasionally cut the sweetgum (Liquidamber styraciflua) that is coming up in it. (Sweetgum is a native tree, and a rapid colonizer.) We also cut the brambles (Rubus spp.) to prevent them from dominating. (They’re native too.) Finally, of course, we do our best to suppress the invasive aliens; on this front, the main problem here is with Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica). Many thanks to our volunteers, who came from Lake Braddock Secondary School, Joyce Kilmer Middle School, the George Mason University chapter of the Delta Chi fraternity, and FaithsAct, a multi-faith movement inspired by the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

November 3: Our colleague Taylor Beach spent most of this Thursday in Fairfax County’s Big Rocky Run Stream Valley Park, near Awbrey Patent Drive, amending one of our stream buffer plantings. Taylor is Executive Director of Fairfax Releaf and a seasoned tree planter. Her crew of 12 volunteers put in 40 native trees and shrubs, all of them selected from our Wild Plant Nursery. Most of Taylor’s volunteers came from Loundon County’s Adaptive Recreation Program, which serves people with developmental disabilities. “I try to have an event with them every year,” she says, “and your site worked out very well as it wasn’t nearly as far for them to travel as most of our other sites.” (Awbrey Patent is not that far from the Loudon / Fairfax line.) Our initial Awbrey Patent planting dates from 2006, but we have had some trouble keeping the site in good shape. Mile-a-minute weed (Polygonum perfoliatum), an invasive alien vine, has been a big problem here, and powerful floods have carried off our tree-tubes, uprooting seedlings in the process or exposing them to deer browsing. So we were very pleased to have Taylor’s help! Taylor apologizes for the lack of a photo—“too busy digging!” But she reports that everyone had a good time and all the plants went in.

OCTOBER

Volunteers go after invasive alien vegetation in one of our tree plantings at Roundtree Park.

October 22: This Saturday at Roundtree Park, we hosted 33 volunteers from St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church, the University of South Carolina Alumni Association, and 10 local middle and high schools—all for a bout of invasives control. Roundtree is one of our stream-buffer sites; it’s in the Holmes Run drainage. We have several buffer plantings in the park, the oldest of which date from 2006. Some of our trees and shrubs are pretty good-sized now; if it weren’t for the “tree tubes” around many of them, you wouldn’t know that they had been planted in. Unfortunately, Roundtree’s invasives burden is also pretty good sized, and we have to go into the plantings periodically, to cut away the invasive vegetation so that it doesn’t overwhelm the native plants. Today, the volunteers did a fantastic job cutting vines—mainly porcelainberry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata) and English ivy (Hedera helix), and taking down Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii), a big invasive shrub that infests much of the park’s streambank. Little by little, thanks to the volunteers, Roundtree is regaining its native cover!

Matt Craig takes our seed-collecting efforts into the forest canopy.

October 18: Lisa and company are out in the woods and fields almost every day these days, collecting seed both for our own Wild Plant Nursery and for our public-agency partners. Most of this work proceeds at ground level, amidst the native grasses and goldenrods and other native herbs that make up the local meadows. But occasionally our effort gains altitude, as you can see from this picture. That’s Matt Craig, well up a very tall pitch pine (Pinus rigida) collecting cones. We’ll warm those cones up in an oven—an efficient way of getting them to release their seed all at once. And then the seed will join our nursery’s already extensive collection of woody species. In a year or two, when the little pines have grown out a bit, we’ll plant them back into the parks of the DC area.

Volunteers collect Indiangrass seed at Fairfax County's Huntley Meadows Park.

October 16: Another seed-collecting expedition, this time at Fairfax County’s Huntley Meadows Park. Huntley Meadows contains some of northern Virginia’s most important remaining wetlands, and the place is a botanical treasure house. Nobody is allowed in there to collect seed—except us. We consider that an enormous privilege, but it comes with a corresponding responsibility: we have to collect with a light touch. Our collecting must be sustainable, and must not jeopardize the reproductive potential of the plant populations from which we are gathering seed. This Sunday, we focused on Indiangrass (Sorghastrum nutans). Indiangrass is fun to collect; you just sort of strip off the seed with your hand and drop it in a bag. After a while the repeated gesture is sort of like dancing—it’s rhythmic. Our 23 volunteers filled a big sack full of the seed. Lisa and Chris also collected seed from various goldenrods (Solidago spp.), and from a not-very-common herb called “roundleaf throughwort” (Eupatorium rotundifolium). Another wonderful day, another wonderful haul of seed!

Susan Gitlin (in foreground) yanks out a mat of invasives at Occoquan Bay.

October 15: On Saturday, nine of us went out to our patch at the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge to spend several hours chopping and yanking invasives. Our patch is 12.5 acres of mostly very dense eastern gamagrass (Tripsacum dactyloides). The gamagrass is native, but our patch, in its present state, is not in very good shape. That’s partly because so many invasives have found their way into the gamagrass, and partly because the gamagrass itself is so dense. (We’re not sure how it got that way, but nobody we’ve spoken to was willing to label it as “natural.”) Our volunteers went to work in the most infested part of the gamagrass. They hauled out and bagged what seemed like a ton of Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum), Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), and various other species of creeping green crud. We stuffed our haul into Susan’s pickup truck, since Susan had generously offered to cart the stuff out of the Refuge. And off it went!

At Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve, in Loudon County, Virginia, we collected many large bags of seed from wild meadow species.

October 10: This Monday, our team joined a group of Loudoun County Master Naturalists for a seed-collecting expedition at Loudon’s Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve. We collected bags and bags of seed from many local meadow species, including wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia), purpletop grass (Tridens flavus), and elephant’s foot (Elephantopus carolinianus). Our Loudon colleagues Ron Circe, Susan Abraham, and the Friends of Banshee Reeks really went out of their way to make our effort a success—right down to providing a picnic at the end of it! Banshee Reeks (the name means, roughly, “ghost mists”) covers some 800 acres of field and forest. It’s Ron’s job to manage all of that, with just a single assistant. This may sound impossible, but years and years of work have begun to transform the property’s fields, formerly dominated by exotic fescue grasses, into areas that look more and more like native meadow. Through our seed harvest, Ron’s hard work and generosity will soon benefit Fairfax County’s meadows as well.

At the Wild Plant Nursery, volunteers extract seed from our huge collection of milkweed pods.

October 6: We took advantage of Thursday’s fine weather to clean a small mountain of common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) seed out at our Wild Plant Nursery. Our extremely productive volunteers—many of them Arlington Master Naturalists—tore open the wet, moldy milkweed pods, pulled the tufts of filaments off the seed (the tufts allow the seed to float in the air) and dropped the seed in plastic bags. Those pods were more than moldy; they were really kind of slimy. Not a job for the fastidious! But as one volunteer put it, “it’s easier to keep going than it was to get started,” so Lisa drove all the way back to the Brights’ house for another big helping of those pods. By the end of the day, three big feed-sacks of milkweed pods had been cleaned. Many future butterflies will owe their lives to our volunteers.

Soggy but busy: the check-out table at our fall native-plant sale did over $8,400 worth of business.

October 2: Our fall native plant sale was a record-breaking success. The sale was hosted in collaboration with the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists and took place on Sunday at our Wild Plant Nursery. Its goal was to raise money for ecological restoration work in Fairfax County parks. Visitors chose from a wide range of our nursery stock—by our count, 77 tree and shrub species and 99 herb and vine species were on offer, all of them grown from local, wild populations, as is the case with all our nursery plants. Patrons also had a chance to sample our Rising Forests Coffee, a product of our Tree Bank / Hispaniola program. It rained a little, off and on throughout the day, but that didn’t seem to dampen the turn-out—and the plants seemed pretty happy about it.

Preliminary results: some 80 people bought about 1,170 plants. Our sale revenue, including some donations, came to about $8,440. That’s the most that we have ever raised since we started hosting these sales. (Our first sale was in May 2010; we host two sales per year, one in spring and one in fall.)

We are extremely grateful to all the people who worked so hard to organize this event. More than 20 people were involved in that effort, and their work reached well beyond the sale itself, to benefit our nursery operation as a whole. Many thanks to them all.

SEPTEMBER

At the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, students from the Stone Ridge Sacred Heart High School load invasive slash into the back of Leigh's pickup truck.

September 28: On Wednesday, 42 sophomores from the Stone Ridge Sacred Heart girls high school in Bethesda, Maryland came all the way out to our grassland site at the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, in Prince William County, Virginia, to help us with our invasives-control efforts there. The students groomed about an acre of grassland, and hauled out a couple of pickup-truck loads of invasive slash—mostly grasses but also some vines and shrubs. Our Occoquan Bay site is about 12.5 acres, so the students managed a substantial improvement for just one day. The Occoquan Bay NWR is an ecologically important area, especially for birds; some 220 native bird species have been found there. Our partnership with Stone Ridge is benefitting a growing number of northern Virginia parks; last October, Stone Ridge students helped out at the Native Arboretum and Folly Lick Stream Valley Park, a stream-buffer site.

September 27: Our Tree Bank / Hispaniola's "Rising Forests" coffee is now available for sale! Read Chris’s note of September 27.

Volunteers from the accounting firm PBGH plant spicebush, a native forest-understory shrub, at Fairfax County's Wilburdale Park.

September 26: 10 volunteers from the accounting firm PBGH spent most of the day with us this Monday at Wilburdale Park, along Fairfax County’s Backlick Run. We were extending our work in part of Wilburdale’s forest, in an area where we’re clearing invasive understory and groundlayer. The volunteers took out substantial quantities of the invasive shrub, European privet (Ligustrum vulgare), and two very common invasive vines, Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) and English ivy (Hedera helix). Then they planted about 30 spicebush (Lindera benzoin) in the resulting clearing. Spicebush is an important native shrub in Mid-Atlantic moist forest. Unfortunately, one of the volunteers slipped and injured herself, but everyone else soldiered on, and did a great job. (We wish our injured friend a speedy recovery!) We don’t know if there’s something about accounting that is congenial to fieldwork, but PBGH volunteers are a tough, effective, and very cheerful crowd. Last September, they did an enrichment planting at Franklin Middle School, one of our stream-buffer sites. We are very pleased that they have added Wilburdale to their ledger this year.

At Meadowood, volunteers uproot sweetgum saplings from meadow. Sweetgum is a native tree, and we’re glad to have it in the forest, but we’re trying to stop it from colonizing the property’s meadows.

September 24: A large but unquantified assortment of volunteers from the Church of Latter Day Saints, Sewa International, scout troops, and the Sangha’s usual suspects joined BLM staff and volunteers for several hours this Saturday, at Meadowood. We were celebrating National Public Lands Day, fixing storm damage to Meadowood’s trails, and doing some meadow work. The latter effort focused mostly on removing sweetgum (Liquidamber styraciflua) saplings to prevent one of the property’s fields from reverting to woodland. Everyone seemed to have a great time—and we really got a lot done. What is that saying about many hands? Well, it’s true!

September 23: We funded our second batch of Tree Bank / Hispaniola “Forest Credit” loans today. Our Forest Credit program launched earlier this month. (See the entry for September 9.) The program extends small lines of credit to our Tree Bank farmers, who live along a section of the Dominican Republic – Haiti border, to help them improve their farming. In exchange, the farmers must set up permanent forest-conservation easements, to help conserve patches of native forest that survive on their lands. It took a couple of years to get agreement on how the system should work, but things have finally come together. So far, we have made 16 loans in all, totaling about $5,800, in exchange for easements amounting to a little under 51 acres. We plan to make more loans, and expand the lines of credit that we have already extended, but we think it’s important to proceed at a measured pace, so that we can fix any problems that come up, while those problems are still small.

September 18: This Sunday saw three of our Weeding Divas—Donna, Joanne, and Jody—back amidst the Japanese pachysandra in the gorge drainage at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project. Jody reports that they were joined by two other volunteers—John and his son, Andrew—and the result was a substantial harvest of the offending invasive. Great stuff! Additional news: Tom, perhaps better known in the Diva circle as Denise’s husband, had paid a visit to the Preserve earlier in the week, and cut away the storm damage on the main trail. Jody also reports that she and Joanne are hoping to collect a batch of native ferns, scheduled for rescue in the nearby Scott’s Run drainage, and transplant them into the Preserve, in the area they are clearing of pachysandra. (The Scott’s Run area is going to be bulldozed for a development.) The transplant operation sounds like a good idea to us—not as good as leaving Scott’s Run alone, granted, but if we can’t get that, at least we’ll take the ferns!

Bob Hassett works our little meadow planting on the south side of Long Branch. Note the sycamore trees behind Bob. We put those in just four years ago.

September 17: Lisa and nine volunteers returned to Rutherford Park, to do an enrichment planting in one of our stream-buffer sites along Long Branch Stream. Rutherford includes three of our buffer sites, one of which is planted as forest, one as meadow, and the other, on the south bank of Long Branch, includes both forest and a little patch of wet meadow. This is the patch that the volunteers were working in this Saturday. They did a great job; they put in about 70 native herbaceous (non-woody) meadow plants, including Desmodiums, mistflower, seedbox, cardinal flower, and sneezeweed. (And no, as far as we know, proximity to sneezeweed does not seem to induce sneezing.) All of the stock was propagated at our Wild Plant Nursery. The volunteers also pulled out quite a lot of Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum), an invasive alien species. We have been working this site, off and on, for four years, since it was released from mowing, and our plants are doing really well. But the stiltgrass is a big problem—and not one that we can readily solve. Even if we were to clear all the stiltgrass out of the site, more stiltgrass seed would arrive the next time Long Branch flooded—a pretty frequent occurrence. So for now, we’re just trying to keep our plants growing, in the hope that they’ll displace some of the invasives.

Lauren, Rodney, Jerry, et al. emerge from Waples Mill with bags of seed bound for our Wild Plant Nursery.

September 15: Lisa, a group of about a dozen Arlington Regional Master Naturalists, and Lauren, our new George Mason University intern, spent several hours collecting seed from Fairfax County’s Waples Mill Park, in the Difficult Run drainage. Waples Mill is a Fairfax County stream-buffer site; it also contains a large area, formerly in turf, that was released from mowing a couple of years ago, and that is coming back as wet meadow. Lisa reports that the place looks pretty good—which is why it was on her seed-collecting agenda. The haul this time included a couple of native grass species (deertongue and southern rye), and elephant’s foot, a forb that likes moist areas in sun or partial shade and that, in our judgement, must have received its common name from people wholly unfamiliar with elephants.

Beautiful, rugged, and battered: our Tree Bank project area needs more forest—and its people need more credit.

September 9: After more than two years of planning, talking, and fundraising, our Tree Bank / Hispaniola “Forest Credit” program made its first loans today! The program will extend long-term, low-cost lines of credit to participating farms, in exchange for forest easements on their properties. Credit limits are relatively modest, and linked to the size and condition of the easements; credit limits will rise (or fall) depending on how well borrowers manage their loans.

Our farmers need to borrow in order to plant their cash crops, but up to now, they have not had access to reasonably priced credit, and that has been a big problem for them. Many of them end up borrowing at loan-shark rates that cost them most of their harvest proceeds and that keep them poor, no matter how hard they work. Our Forest Credit program is the first low-cost farm credit program in the region, and the first forest easement system. We think the program has huge potential—for both the farms and the forests—but we’re starting small and working with care. Today we made nine loans, totaling a little over $3,000; those loans are matched by easements amounting to about 34.5 acres. We’re off to a solid start, and our farmers are very enthusiastic about this program! Chris Bright will quote some of our farmers about this program in his next entry in Speaking Broadly.

September 5: Bad weather, bad news. Gaspar, our Tree Bank / Hispaniola Project Director, just sent word today that Hurricane Irene scored a direct hit on our Tree Bank nursery. All of the nursery’s shade cloth has been shredded, and it will all have to be replaced. We don’t yet know how much that will cost, but it is likely to come to a couple of thousand dollars. If you’re interested in the Tree Bank, now would be a great time to make a donation!

September 4: A quartet of “Weeding Divas”—Jody, Denise, Joanne, and Donna—spent several hours this Sunday morning at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project, to resume their weeding in the gorge drainage. They were joined by Bob and Amy, and their two young sons. Jody reports: “We removed a lot of pachysandra, as well as some vinca, multiflora rose, and bits of ivy trying to get re-established.” Persistence works! Jody also reports that Hurricane Irene downed a few big tree limbs, which fell on the main trail. A Diva spouse (Denise’s husband, Tom) has already been instructed to remedy the situation.

“Cupping” our Tree Bank coffee: Matt tastes a series of roasts.

September 3: Matt and Chris spent most of Saturday afternoon testing our Tree Bank coffee, by roasting little batches of it for different lengths of time, and tasting the results. Our work differed in a couple of important respects from that of professional coffee evaluators, as follows. 1: We weren’t very good at it. And 2: We swallowed all the coffee that we tasted, so we were extremely alert and talkative by the end of our session. Results in brief: this stuff is really good! We were trying to figure out where in the roasting spectrum our coffee tastes best, and we’re thinking a kind of medium to dark Vienna. We hope that sounds like something you would want in your cup!

Seed-hugger: Lisa embraces a big bag of wild native-grass seed. The seed will be used to restore native meadows.

September 1: Lisa reports a successful seed-collecting excursion to Huntley Meadows, in the company of four of our seasoned collaborators from the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists. The goal was to collect native-grass seed for our meadow restoration efforts. “We got a lot!” she says, “and these Arlington people—they are really good.” High praise indeed. After the Huntley junket, Lisa departed solo for the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, where she bagged lots of additional seed. Quite a haul!

AUGUST

At the Wild Plant Nursery, Matt unclogs a growing-trough drain the day after Irene's visit.

August 28: We are very pleased to report that hurricane Irene spared our Wild Plant Nursery. By Sunday afternoon, the storm had cleared the DC area and we went out to the nursery to assess the impact. Nothing much to report! Some shade cloth had popped off the frames, and a few frame sockets needed to be reset, but that was really about it—apart from about five inches of water in the growing troughs. A lot of our seedlings were under water, but we got all the growing-trough drains working, and the seedlings will be fine. They won’t even remember. We were very lucky.

At the Wild Plant Nursery, Alison Smith, Watering Diva Extraordinaire, at right, with one of our St. John’s volunteers. (Our apologies for not knowing her name!)

August 24: It’s late summer and Hurricane Irene is an ominous but still distant Caribbean phenomenon. Work at our Wild Plant Nursery continues along its happy and productive course. Since the heat is not too bad, we’re already transplanting seedlings out of flats and into pots for next year’s season. And of course, we’re watering, as you can see here. It’s Wednesday, so our St. John’s volunteers are out to help with the watering, in collaboration with our Watering Divas. St. John’s Community Services is a charity that works to create social opportunities for disabled people. For several years, St. John’s clients have been volunteering at our nursery, helping to water, pot, and take care of the plants—and we’re very pleased to be working with them. Not much news here, of course, but Irene’s forecast storm-track is giving our work today an odd kind of anticipatory quality. What will this place look like on Monday?

At the Native Arboretum, Georgetown University students begin weeding invasives out of the gorge, on a slope that contains a dense population of native trillium species.

August 23: On Tuesday, 11 incoming Georgetown University freshmen joined Lisa and veteran volunteers Jim Clark and Jerry Schrepple at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve for a weeding project in a sensitive area of the gorge drainage. (Wow. Where else are you going to read a lead like that?) The Preserve is the site of our Native Arboretum project; it is also one of the last remaining areas along this section of the Potomac that is still home to naturally-occurring populations of three native trillium species: large-flowered trillium (Trillium grandiflorum), purple trillium (T. erectum var. erectum), and yellow trillium (T. luteum). The slope that the students were working on is the Preserve’s trillium Serengeti, so to speak. (You can see both flowers and slope in the Native Arboretum Native Plants slide show; see the links panel on the Native Arboretum page.) Unfortunately, that slope is also badly infested with several invasive alien plants that are likely to suppress the trilliums, unless we manage to suppress the invasives first. Hence the weeding project. Among the invasives that the students removed: the ground-cover periwinkle (Vinca minor), and the shrubs burningbush (Euonymus alatus) and Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii). The trilliums are dormant this time of year—their top-growth is now pretty well exhausted and most of their vitality is in their roots—so we don’t have to worry that we’ll hurt them by stepping on them. For several years now, Georgetown students have helped us at our Native Arboretum project, as well as with our work at the Roaches Run Wildfowl Sanctuary. Both parks are better places because of that Georgetown connection.

At the Jessup, Maryland, warehouse used by ATC International, Matt Bright (center) takes a look at our first shipment of Tree Bank coffee beans. Nearly three years of effort have finally paid off.

August 19: Finally, after nearly three years of work, the first shipment of coffee from our Tree Bank farmers has arrived in the United States, and is now stashed safely in a warehouse in Jessup, Maryland—thanks in large measure to Amy Frey. Amy is president of the import / export firm ATC International; she has been helping us negotiate the complexities of bringing a food product into the United States. We’re importing our farmers’ coffee to help them make money—our farmers are very poor—and to add value to the forests that remain on their land. Virtually all coffee in our project region is shade-grown; by buying it, we are helping the forests pay for themselves.

Our first shipment is small—only 167 kilos—but that will be enough to get us started. We wanted to import more but, as so frequently happens in our project region, circumstances were not exactly favorable. First, a prolonged drought during the first half of the year forced several of our farmers to withdraw their coffee from our program because they wanted to sell it immediately—a sad situation for everyone involved, since as soon as we heard about this, we offered to pay them (and everyone else) immediately. And our buying price is guaranteed to be at least 10% higher than the current standard price for “Gold Selection” coffee, the top Dominican grade. But several people just panicked anyway and sold at a lower rate. And then, because our farmers aren’t yet used to growing for export, they didn’t prepare and harvest all of the coffee as well as they could have, thereby reducing the amount that qualified for that top “Gold Selection” grade, which is the only grade that we will buy. And finally, after our precious Gold Selection beans had been all cleaned up and bagged, someone stole eight kilos of them! But despite all that, the stuff is now here—most of it anyway—and we’re learning. Next time, things will go more smoothly. To find out more about our coffee program, click the Coffee tab on the Tree Bank / Hispaniola page. And we’ll be sure to let you know when it’s available!

The Hatted Ones, Lisa on left and Shared Earth’s Caroline Gabel on right, have a look at the Thompson Creek floodplain at Meadowood.

August 10: Caroline Gabel, President of the Shared Earth Foundation, spent this Wednesday morning with us at Meadowood, touring our various sites, and discussing assorted restoration conundrums, both local and farther afield. Shared Earth was the Sangha’s earliest institutional supporter and has been instrumental in building our Wild Plant Nursery; Shared Earth has also provided us with much-needed funding to work out better methods of invasives-control at our Native Arboretum project. But Caroline’s involvement with us extends beyond the standard financial concerns. She has put us in touch with several very experienced land managers in the mid-Atlantic—people who could help us with both our forest and meadow work. And she is providing some valuable context for our Tree Bank, by helping Chris “compare notes” with restoration projects in Guatemala and Borneo—projects that Caroline has been working with for many years. We are very grateful for all of her help!

August 7: Lisa and Matt returned to Wilburdale Park this Sunday morning, with Alex Kim and Alex’s father, for another bout of invasives control along Backlick Run. (See the note for August 1.) The crew fanned out on either side of stream, chopping their way through tangles of Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus), an invasive alien vine, and uprooting European privet (Ligustrum vulgare), an invasive alien shrub that is very common in Wilburdale’s understory. (Sorry, no photo—but we’re confident that you can imagine.)

Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District lends a welcome hand at Wilburdale Park.

August 1: At Wilburdale Park, Lisa got some welcome help this Monday from Lily Whitesell, Outreach and Watershed Programs Coordinator for the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District, and six of her interns. Wilburdale encloses a portion of Backlick Run, a big stream in northern Virginia’s Cameron Run drainage, and one of our plantings along the stream was being overwhelmed by invasive alien vines. The problem species here are Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) and porcelainberry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata), both of which are fast-growing, woody Asian species that are thoroughly established at Wilburdale. We have as yet no prospect of eliminating them—not even from the planting, much less the entire park—but regular maintenance will keep our saplings growing.

JULY

At our Wild Plant Nursery, a Diva picnic.

July 31: About a dozen of our Watering and Weedings Divas came by our Wild Plant Nursery this Sunday for a picnic. In true Diva fashion, several Divas showed up early, so that they could do their nursery chores first, and all of them brought dishes to augment the Sangha’s (that is, Lisa’s) spread. It was a very pleasant occasion—low-key, fun, and memorable. Much like the Divas themselves! Some of the Divas are veteran volunteers, and some are newcomers to our work. But all of them share the same ethic—and their dedication and reliability have proven crucial to our nursery effort.

NOVA Soil and Water’s Lily Whitesell and her interns make signs at our Wild Plant Nursery.

July 29: This Friday, Lily Whitesell, Outreach and Watershed Programs Coordinator for the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District, visited our Wild Plant Nursery with a group of seven high school students—her summer interns—to help us with a project that we should have done long ago: putting in signs and labels. To date, you just had to know where things were in order to ... know where things were. You also had to know what things were, since, for the most part, our stock was not labeled. Nikki Oteyza, the Sangha’s Conservation Manager, had been working on a solution for this for a while, and she recruited Lily and company to implement it. First, the interns built durable, waterproof number signs to label each of our container-yard aisles. Then they assembled two types of botanical signs to help everyone manage the stock. Using vinyl cards and small plastic stakes, they hand-wrote signs that can be positioned in batches of plants. To make the second kind of botanical sign, they cut up “re-purposed” window-blind slats for use as labels for individual pots. (These slats are made of a plastic that is ideal for writing on with a sharpie—as many four-year-olds probably know.) By the end of the day, thanks to Lily and her interns, our nursery had become surprisingly literate!

The fruits of solarization. Could this speed up our restoration work? We’re trying to figure that out.

July 27: Matt and Chris ventured into our grassland site at the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge this Wednesday morning to check on our solarization plot. (See the note for June 12.) It works—in the rather obvious sense that the heavy black plastic, left in place during the growing season for over a month, kills all the top-growth that it covers. No real surprises there but any success, however modest, is welcome! The big challenge is going to be figuring out whether solarization can “soften up” enough patches cheaply and quickly enough to advance our restoration goals. To help figure that out, we put in a set of four 10-foot by 10-foot plastic squares on frames, to see if we can find a convenient way to make make this technique more mobile. Stay tuned.

At Meadowood, Matt sets up a solarization square in the Big Meadow.

Also July 27: Matt and Chris visited the Big Meadow at Meadowood, to check on our solarization patches there. In the Big Meadow, we are using plastic tarp to suppress Chinese lespedeza (Lespedeza cuneata), our worst invasive alien weed on this site. (See the note for June 17.) Here too, the initial results are encouraging; all of the lespedeza top-growth beneath the plastic is dead. But we don’t know yet whether the plant’s extensive root stock is damaged by this treatment, whether a selection of appropriate native species could colonize the solarized area before the lespedeza returns, or whether the method is cheap enough to be scaled up. We need to figure that out. As a next step, we set up a several of our 10-foot by 10-foot solarization squares here too.

July 25: Our freight forwarder in the Dominican Republic tells us that, at long last, our first batch of Tree Bank coffee has finally shipped! We have been trying for nearly three years to develop a coffee export program for our Tree Bank farmers, as a way of improving their incomes, and adding economic value to their remaining forests. In our project area, virtually all coffee is shade-grown; by buying it, we are helping to supply an economic rationale for preserving and restoring forest. It will probably be a couple more weeks before the coffee arrives at the ATC International warehouse in Maryland. We’ll let you know when it’s available!

Lisa explains the United States to our Central Asian and American guests. (Actually, she just talked about plants. American plants.)

July 23: A group of about 20 young people, more or less of college freshman age, came by our Wild Plant Nursery this Saturday for a tour and discussion. Such an event might not seem very newsworthy, except that most of these people came from Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan—nationalities not heavily represented in our nursery clientele. To say the least. Our guests were participants in the “Benjamin Franklin Summer Institute with South and Central Asia,” a program that brings students from those countries to the United States for several weeks. (There were also several American students in the program.) Among the things that the students wanted to see were some local environmental programs. They were also interested in getting a sense for how American civil society works. So we told them all about it—as best as we could! Post-discussion, the students helped weed some raised bed aisles, then one of them apologized for not having removed all of the weeds. We like that brand of civil society! Other observations: there were many comments about how amazing all the green is around here, since most of these people come from very dry regions. (Of course we pointed out that not all green was good.) And a conclusion from touring the ‘burbs of northern Virginia: “you build cities in the middle of forests!” (We agreed that we do indeed do that.) Many thanks to program organizer Mara Schoeny, from the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.

A group of our Watering Divas at the Wild Plant Nursery.

July 10: Not much news at present, but we’re out there despite the heat. Lisa is scouting out sites for her seed-collecting blitz this fall. Our Watering Divas are keeping all those thousands of native plants happy at the Wild Plant Nursery. Lisa says the Divas are life-savers—and from our plants’ point of view, that’s no metaphor. We’re also checking on our field sites, evaluating them, and working on our agenda for fall—and for 2012.

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