JUNE

At the Native Arboretum, some of our most experienced volunteers give this slope a thorough weeding.

June 25: More progress this Saturday against the invasive alien burningbush (Euonymus alatus), at our Native Arboretum project. Eleven volunteers, most of them regulars, spent the morning pulling burningbush seedlings in the Preserve’s gorge area. We were pleased to be working with so many of our veterans—board member Bruce Engelbert, Mary Webster (one of our Nursery Watering Divas), Bob and Henry Hassett, Jerry Schrepple, and Andrew Kim, among others. Invasives control might not seem like an ideal organizing principle for community activism but somehow, our members have managed to make it work!

Lisa Williams and her Northern Virginia Community College biology class at the Native Arboretum. That’s Lisa in the front row, second from left. The figure with the hat is Lisa Bright.

June 22: Lisa Williams, a botany professor at Northern Virginia Community College, spent this Wednesday afternoon with 23 of her students at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project. This was not a tour; it was instead an opportunity for—you guessed it—invasives control. We continued with the task that we had taken up on the 11th: pulling Asiatic tearthumb (Polygonum perfoliatum) along the forest edges. Then we moved into the Preserve’s gorge area to uproot young burningbush (Euonymus alatus) shrubs. The students did a good job; for many of them, this was their first experience with any kind of field biology. We were very pleased that Lisa chose our site for this lesson in “applied botany”!

At Meadowood, volunteers from Discovery Media install tree tubes around wild oak and hickory seedlings, to protect them from deer browsing.

June 17: Friday was a “Discover Your Impact” Day of Service for Discovery Media employees, and our Meadowood sites were chosen as one of the company’s volunteer service venues. Twenty-two Discovery volunteers took part and we split up to work on three different tasks. Nikki and summer intern Amber Nichols led one group into the forest along Thompson Creek, to set tree shelters around naturally-occurring (not planted) oak and hickory seedlings, so that they will have a better chance of growing above the deer browse line. Chris and Matt led another group into the Big Meadow, to install sheets of plastic tarp over infestations of Chinese lespedeza (Lespedeza cuneata). We’re hoping that this “solarization” will cook the lespedeza, our biggest invasive problem on this site, and loosen its grip. And Lisa, Philip, and long-time volunteer Jerry Schrepple worked with yet another group of Discovery employees in our Horse Barn and Ecological Display sites. The task there was to build and install wire cages around saplings that had outgrown their tree tubes but that were still vulnerable to deer. All three projects went extremely well, and we’re very grateful to our Discovery friends for helping us make so much progress in the course of just a single day!

Two Lake Braddock students set up a solarization tarp at Occoquan Bay.

June 12: This Sunday, eight volunteers, most of them environmental science students from Lake Braddock Secondary School, ventured out into the full sun and oven heat to take on invasives at our grassland site at the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Some of us cut invasives along the edge of the site. And two hardy volunteers helped Chris set up a 2,000-square-foot black plastic tarp in the midst of the eastern gamagrass (Tripsacum dactyloides) that dominates most of our site. We’re using the tarp to test “solarization” as a strategy for opening up the dense stand of gamagrass. Solarization uses a plastic covering, set out in full light, to cook the vegetation beneath it. The gamagrass that dominates our site is native but we are trying to create a more open and diverse grassland, to improve the site as breeding habitat for grassland birds. Chris hopes to use solarization as a kind of substitute for grassland fire. Fire is a natural phenomenon now almost entirely missing from our landscape. We’ll see how well this works! Moving that tarp around in the heat and dense grass was no fun, and the Lake Braddock students deserve a lot of credit for finishing the chore.

Volunteer Bob Hassett pursues Asiatic tearthumb along the forest edge at the Native Arboretum.

June 11: This Saturday at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project, nine volunteers pulled infestations of the invasive alien vine Asiatic tearthumb, or mile-a-minute weed (Polygonum perfoliatum) out of many of our forest-edge work areas. This quick-growing spiny annual vine is a real scourge. We have been able to control it in some parts of the Preserve, but that takes years of pulling and pulling. If you keep doing that, then you eventually exhaust the seed bank, at which point, light weeding prevents new infestations from taking hold. Forget about being clever; persistence is what really matters. That’s the tearthumb lesson for living!

At the Wild Plant Nursery, Chris Bright reads one of his quasi-poems during our Day of Reflection.

June 5: This Sunday we held our annual “Day of Reflection” at the Wild Plant Nursery. This event is as close as our Sangha gets to ceremony, since the Day includes a taking of the Bodhisattva Vows, for those of us formally committed to the Buddhist path. There is also a chance for everyone to speak, and reflect, on the Day’s theme. A different theme is chosen each year. This year’s theme was “Relationships”—between one person and another, and between people and other living things. Almost all of our attendees spoke, and all of the speakers had something interesting and, well, authentic to say. It was also rewarding to discover how all these various points of view complemented each other. There was music as well as talk—a beautiful performance by Jody Marshall on her hammered dulcimer, and Stephen Lewis and Andrew Keegan brought their guitars. We had a quick tour of the nursery, and the event wrapped up with a picnic.

MAY

Friends of Eagle Scout candidate Jonathan Day attack invasive alien vines at the Native Arboretum.

May 28: On Saturday, Eagle Scout candidate Jonathan Day led a group of 25 volunteers in a massive invasive-plant pull at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project. Jonathan and fellow troop members were working on the slope above the Restored Habitat Area, in the area where the forest borders the lawn adjoining the property’s house. This area was completely covered by Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) and Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus). Not any more! Jonathan and crew did a phenomenal job removing the stuff, and they followed up with a planting of appropriate native shrubs and trees, brought in from our Wild Plant Nursery. This was a big step forward for our work in this part of the park: we are now pushing against the invasives from both edges of that forest. Actually, even as Jonathan’s group was clearing the vines along the forest edge, another group of volunteers was working downslope, weeding an area that we had already brought under partial control. We still have a long way to go out there but we’re making strong progress.

An Art of Living volunteer cuts invasives away from one of our plantings at Wilburdale Park.

May 21: On Saturday, we returned to Wilburdale Park in the Annandale section of Fairfax County, Virginia, after over a year-long hiatus. An energetic group of 27 volunteers from local high schools and the DC chapter of the Art of Living Foundation helped to protect our Wilburdale plantings from a host of invasive alien vines and shrubs; we also did some general site maintenance, such as resetting tree shelters. We pulled out European privet (Ligustrum vulgare) and Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) shrubs, and cut back Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) vines. Nikki Oteyza, the Sangha’s Conservation Manager, led the event and was very impressed by the group’s curiosity about the work that they were doing. "It’s always refreshing to collaborate with people who really care about the reasons why they’re removing these plants. They seem to put more genuine effort into the work."

The check-out line grows at the Wild Plant Nursery spring sale.

May 15: The spring plant sale held this Sunday at our Wild Plant Nursery was a huge success, thanks to the 20 volunteers who ran the sale, and all our various colleagues, board members, and friends who helped to plan it. We offer special thanks to members of the Arlington Regional Master Naturalists, our main partner for this event. ARMN members have been a powerful creative force out at the nursery this year and last, and the success of the sale was, in large measure, due to them. Over a hundred species native trees, shrubs, vines, forbs, and grasses were on offer, and loads of plants were carted off by local native-plant enthusiasts. We collected nearly $9,000—a record for us. All sale proceeds will go to restoration projects on Fairfax County parkland. And we’re already looking forward to our fall sale!

Eagle fledgling Colin Drake and troop build the mother of all cold frames at our Wild Plant Nursery. That’s Colin sitting on his project, and tying his shoe.

May 14: This Saturday was the day of Colin Drake’s Eagle Scout project at our Wild Plant Nursery. Colin is the younger son of Elizabeth Burke and Tom Drake. Elizabeth is a veteran volunteer and a member of our board. Elizabeth’s and Tom’s elder son, Dylan, built the shade frame over a large section of our nursery container yard as his Eagle project. Dylan went large; Colin, on the other hand, went for depth. Not that his project was small: Colin designed a 40-foot-long cold frame. Colin and Tom even built a sample section at home, to test the design. (It worked!) Today Colin and troop built the whole thing and set it up in our container yard. The cold frame consists of a set of exterior-grade plywood boxes, each eight feet long and four feet wide. The sections are open at the bottom but lined with wire mesh; their tops are hinged wooden frames with transparent plastic sheet stretched over them. The crew even rigged up lines from our shade frame to hold the tops open when we care for the stock that the boxes will eventually hold. The cold frame will function like a “mini-greenhouse” where we can protect sprouting seedlings during winter and early spring. During the warm season, we’ll use it for delicate stock that might dry out too quickly if it were kept in the open. We had been hoping to build a big cold frame for years but never managed to do it. We are very grateful to Colin and crew for this major piece of nursery infrastructure!

Volunteers plant swamphaw and black chokeberry at Meadowood, in the Thompson Creek floodplain.

May 7: On Saturday, 11 volunteers from several local high schools joined us at Meadowood to continue our work in the forest. (See the note for May 1.) We planted swamphaw (Viburnum nudum) black chokeberry (Photinia melanocarpa), and sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), among other native species. As always at our plantings, all the stock came from our own Wild Plant Nursery. Since this was Virgina’s “Invasive Plant Removal Day,” we took the volunteers on a tour of the Thompson Creek floodplain and removed a few manageable patches of Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum), while discussing the local ecology. Then we showed them a monster stiltgrass infestation, which stretches for the better part of a mile along the Creek’s main channel. We left that for another Invasives Removal Day!

At Meadowood, volunteer Jen Cowham plants American elm seedlings in a nice, soggy channel that runs into Thompson Creek.

May 1: On Sunday, we finally took a break from the full sun of our meadow projects and retreated to the shade of the forest at Meadowood. Our group of 20 volunteers was made up mostly of South County Secondary School students and members of Sewa International, a Hindu-inspired nonprofit that promotes volunteerism. Working in the wooded floodplain of Thompson Creek, we installed over 300 seedlings of spicebush (Lindera benzoin), American elm (Ulmus americana), American hazelnut (Corylus americana), flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), southern arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum), and other native shrubs and trees that are either generalist (they grow in a wide range of conditions) or that favor wet soils. This part of Meadowood’s forest is dying back because the water table has risen and the big trees are, in effect, drowning. The rising water table is a consequence of heavier stormwater runoff. We’re trying to help the forest adapt to the new conditions by planting species that are native to this part of the coastal plain and that do well in wet soils. We are also trying to mitigate the effects of intensive deer browsing, which has forced declines in many native tree and shrub species in Meadowood's forests.

APRIL

A CBS camera crew shoots an interview with Lisa at our Wild Plant Nursery.

April 23: Two producers from the CBS News religion unit came down from New York City, joined up with a local CBS camera crew, and followed us around this Saturday, for a very full day of talking and touring, and even a little field-work! (We and the volunteers did the field work; the CBS people had their own work to do.) The Sangha is one of four groups that will be included in a program on green religious activists that will air in June. (We’ll post a link to program under the “Media Coverage” tab on the Library page.)

We hope to establish several species of native grasses on our Occoquan Bay site by direct-sowing of local-ecotype seed.

April 17: We returned this Sunday to our Occoquan Bay grassland site, to do some additional planting in our plowed patches. (See the note for April 3.) In addition to putting in 160 pots of grasses and forbs, we sowed two of the patches with native grass seed. The planting was easy but we think the growing may be hard. The dominant species at this site, eastern gamagrass, is very well established; a single bout of plowing and planting is unlikely to force its retreat. A further complication: many of the species that we are planting here take a couple of years to establish themselves, so progress is likely to be slow. But slow is okay! We’re not going anywhere, and we’ll have time to learn more about the site.

Lake Braddock environmental science instructor Mark Khosravi with trophy sweetgum stem.

April 10: A group of 36 volunteers, mostly Lake Braddock Secondary School students, along with a small troop of post-high school volunteers, resumed work this Sunday in the Gravel Quarry Meadow at Meadowood, cutting sweetgum trees, bramble, and Japanese honeysuckle. (The sweetgum and bramble are native but we’re trying to prevent them from taking over the meadow.) We also transplanted about 20 redcedar seedlings out of the Gravel Quarry Meadow, where there are lots of them, to the Ecological Display Site, which lies nearby and where we are trying to establish two redcedar groves. Special thanks to Lake Braddock environmental science instructor Mark Khosravi for keeping everyone on task, and for demonstrating the operational limits of brush saws.

Volunteers return to the Big Meadow at Meadowood.

April 9: On this Saturday, we went back out to the Big Meadow at Meadowood for another bout of planting in the meadow’s plowed patches. Our nine volunteers did a great job—another 250 pots of grasses and forbs went in, bringing the total number of plants installed here this spring to 1,100. Our plantings in this site have something of an experimental character. We know more or less what species of plants ought to occur here, and we’re growing most of those species at our Wild Plant Nursery. What we don’t know is how hard it will be to establish them amidst the dense, exotic Eurasian fescue grass that dominates most of this site. Our best guess at present: we’ll lose some species completely but succeed with a few. If that happens, then we’ll look for ways to extend the reach of the successful few, and reintroduce the rest in areas where our successes have suppressed most of the fescue. It’s a process!

Volunteers do our first planting at Occoquan Bay.

April 3: This Sunday morning, we did our first planting at our 12.5-acre grassland site at the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, in Prince William County, Virginia. Our site is covered with eastern gamagrass, a tall, perennial native grass that can grow in very dense stands. One of our goals for this site is to create a more open and diverse native grassland, since that would improve habitat value for native grassland birds. As at our meadow plantings at Meadowood, we are focusing on areas where the current cover has been plowed up, at least partly. (Just planting at random into the gammagrass would be pointless; nothing would survive.) This morning, a group of 9 volunteers, working in one of our plowed patches, put in about 200 pots of native grasses and forbs, all from our Wild Plant Nursery. The planting itself wasn’t difficult but we’re not yet sure how successful it will be because we’ve never worked in a gamagrass stand before. Time will tell.

Air Force volunteers plant one of our restoration patches in the Big Meadow at Meadowood.

April 2: A group of 30 volunteers, most of them from the Air Force, helped us get our main meadow planting at Meadowood off to a great start this Saturday morning. We went to work on a 17-acre site that we have named, rather hopefully, the “Big Meadow.” It’s already big, of course, but it’s almost entirely covered with exotic fescue grasses, which pretty much disqualifies it, at present, for meadow status. Our volunteers began to change that, by putting in a variety of native grasses and forbs. (Forbs are herbaceous plants that aren’t grasses.) All of these plants were grown from local, wild seed at our Wild Plant Nursery. The plantings went into a set of patches where the fescue had been plowed up. The idea is to try to establish native plant communities in these patches and then expand them. This is likely to be a long and difficult process. But then that’s true of most beneficial change!

MARCH

A volunteer collects tree-of-heaven saplings from our meadow site at Occoquan Bay.

March 27: The morning's snow flurries didn't keep Lisa and 10 volunteers from Lake Braddock and Fairfax High Schools from heading out to the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge to pull Japanese honeysuckle and cut black locust and tree-of-heaven. Japanese honeysuckle is an invasive alien vine; tree-of-heaven is an invasive alien tree. Black locust is a tree as well; it's native to eastern North America but it's a "native invasive"—it would cover our Occoquan Bay meadow if we didn't push it back. Lisa said, "We tried to cancel the event because of the snow, but these kids were determined to work, and they worked hard!"

Patrick Dubois' scout troop reorganize the Native Arboretum Pollinator Garden.

March 26: Eagle Scout candidate Patrick Dubois and 25 energetic crew members reorganized the Native Pollinator Garden at our Native Arboretum, and did a fantastic job. They thinned the tickseed sunflower, wingstem, and coralberry that had overcrowded the garden, and amended the garden by adding a diverse selection of herbaceous plants, all chosen from our Wild Plant Nursery. While Patrick and company worked the Pollinator Garden, a group of Lake Braddock High School students weeded the propagation beds, and Nikki and Alejandro (our University of Virginia volunteer) made wire cages to protect plants from deer. On the lawn near the parking lot, they caged some native hydrangeas that we had put in last year, and created a log border to protect the area from mowing. We hope it will become an attractive addition to the rain garden plantings on the front lawn.

Philip and Lisa sow local-ecotype little bluestem, a native grass, along the eroding slopes of the "dimple meadow" at Meadowood.

March 24: Lisa, Philip, and Nikki spent an afternoon planting around the stormwater catchment pond on our Ecological Display Site at Meadowood. The pond's excavation and the drainage system are now complete, so it's safe to begin planting the banks. Some native grasses, as well as chokeberry (a native shrub), now line the border between the pond and the gravel path that leads into the site. They also returned to the "dimple meadow" (see the note for March 13) to sow native grass seed in some eroding areas.

March 23: The Shared Earth Foundation has generously renewed its support of the Sangha, with a $15,000 grant, of which $10,000 has been designated for the Wild Plant Nursery, and the other $5,000 for our "Rethinking Invasives Control" project at the Native Arboretum. Shared Earth was the first foundation to take an interest in the Sangha and has been supporting our nursery since 2001. Caroline Gabel, Shared Earth's CEO, has visited the nursery many times; she has also visited the Native Arboretum twice—evidence, we think, of her keen interest in our work. Caroline is also helping us extend our network of contacts into Maryland. We are very grateful to her for both the networking and the financial support!

At Roaches Run, Clemson University students show off their wet shoes as they wade into the tidal pond to pick up trash.

March 23: On their last day in town, our Clemson volunteers continued their work at Roaches Run. (See the entries for the previous two days.) This time, we gave them a break from invasives control and had them do some planting. They were so good at it that Erik, our National Park Service colleague, had to make three trips to pick up additional truckloads of plants! The volunteers planted on both the north and south ends of the Sanctuary, installing a variety of native shrubs and trees, including blackhaw, spicebush, elderberry, winterberry, and buttonbush, as well as dogwood and common alder trees. They also picked up tons of additional trash. (Where does all that stuff come from?) By the end of the day, a massive pile of black trash bags lined the parkway—and the grounds looked a lot less, well, trashy. Passing drivers honked in approval.

Clemson University students at Roaches Run, along with our National Park Service colleague Erik Oberg, reclining in foreground.

March 22: On the second day of their Service Mission, our Clemson University volunteers joined us at the Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary, a National Park Service property along the George Washington Parkway in Arlington. (See March 21 for the volunteers' first day with us.) At Roaches Run, the volunteers went after Amur honeysuckle, an invasive alien shrub, and picked up copious amounts of trash. Lisa pointed out that these people were on spring break—but instead of getting drunk and making a nuisance of themselves, they were putting real effort into caring for natural areas, an activity that they see as caring for God's creation. And they clearly loved doing it. Their stamina and positive attitude were an inspiration to the rest of us.

At the Native Arboretum, Clemson University students cut invasives at the edge of the southern forest.

March 21: 60 students from Clemson University's Fellowship of Christian Athletes travelled all the way up from South Carolina to join us for a three-day "Service Mission." They spent this Monday with us at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project, removing invasive shrubs and vines from the forest south of the main lawn. They cut back multiflora rose and Amur honeysuckle, as well as porcelainberry and wintercreeper euonymus—and they seemed to have a blast doing it! They sang while they worked, and during their lunch break, they kept up their spirits by playing games—including jump-rope with a porcelainberry vine.

Volunteers bag English ivy at Arlington Village.

March 20: About 70 people came out for an invasives-control event at Arlington Village, a community in Arlington County where residents have been working for several years to restore native understory to a forested ravine. Volunteers from Ohio's Kent State University, as well as students from Lake Braddock High School and other local schools, helped the residents remove around 150 trash bags stuffed with English ivy—an invasive dominating the ravine groundlayer. Underneath all that ivy, the volunteers discovered some natives still holding their ground—including at least one species of low-bush blueberry. Whether you're measuring by ivy subtracted or blueberry remaining, the day qualified as a big success!

At the Native Arboretum, Lisa points out—and cuts down—an Amur honeysuckle shrub, as Potomac School students prepare to repeat that feat many times over.

March 18: At the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project, Lisa, Nikki, and Alejandro (a University of Virginia volunteer), spent this Friday morning with a group of 100 students and six teachers from McLean's Potomac School. The group went after the invasives in the section of forest that we had started clearing in January. They cut a huge number of exotic shrubs—mostly multiflora rose, European privet, and Amur honeysuckle. With the shrubs out of the way, we'll soon be able to deal with the groundlayer invasives.

Howard Gardner students brave the depths of the school's storm pond to install some pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) and other water-loving species.

Also March 18: Lisa and Nikki led the planting of a recently excavated stormwater pond at the Howard Gardner School in Alexandria, with the help of 12 HGS students. Most of the ground was still bare from the pond's construction; to stabilize the banks and add some visual interest, they installed a variety of flood-tolerant plants.

At Meadowood, volunteers preserve native meadow by controlling a sweetgum stand.

March 13: This Sunday morning, 22 volunteers came out to Meadowood, to help control a stand of sweetgum trees in a little meadow where some very beautiful and interesting native grass species are growing. Lisa calls this place the “dimple meadow”—because it’s a relatively small depression with an open, flat bottom, and maybe also because “dimple” sounds more interesting than “bowl.” The place was once a gravel pit—many years ago. Its groundlayer is now dominated by broomsedge, purple lovegrass, and various other native grasses. One of its slopes is home to a large native bee colony. It is, in short, very much what a little eastern meadow ought to be. But it won’t stay that way if we don’t control the sweetgum, a fast-growing native tree that sprouts readily from both seed and established roots. Sweetgum is great—but here we’ve got a little too much of a good thing! The site also has lots of Virginia pine, which we are leaving in place for now, since the pine won’t shade out the grasses.

At Occoquan Bay, volunteers level a clone of blacklocust (Robinia pseudoacacia), to prevent this tree species from taking over our meadow site.

March 5: This Saturday morning, Lisa, Chris, and 14 volunteers started work at our 12.5-acre meadow site at the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Occoquan Bay is new territory for us. It’s part of the National Wildlife Refuge system, which is administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency in the Department of the Interior. At Occoquan Bay, we’ll be working with FWS to improve meadow habitat for the region’s grassland birds. Because of the decline in farming and the spread of the suburbs, grassland birds no longer have much habitat in our region. On our site, we have three big, overlapping tasks: controlling invasives, preventing woody plants from taking over the meadow, and “opening up” the grassland community, which is currently dominated by a single species, eastern gamagrass (Tripsacum dactyloides). Eastern gamagrass is native, and welcome, but more diversity and less density would make the area better bird habitat. Our first order of business is to interrupt succession—that is, stop the spread of trees, both native and alien, into the grassland. Under natural conditions, occasional fires would open up areas like our site. We can’t burn, so we started out with a few hours of weeding and chopping. We’ll need to be a little more strategic as work progresses, but our first step is always to get to know our site, and to get our hands dirty!

FEBRUARY

Multiflora rose and brambles get a thorough haircut at Rutherford Park, along Long Branch Stream.

February 27: Lisa and a group of hard-working high school students spent this Sunday morning at Rutherford Park, which includes a couple of our stream buffer sites. Lisa and company were trying to finish up one item on our spring agenda: Suppressing multiflora rose and brambles along a small section of Long Branch stream, in one of those buffer plantings. Multiflora rose is a large, thorny shrub native to East Asia; it is highly invasive in mid-Atlantic forests and fields. The brambles at Rutherford—also large and thorny—are native. We don’t want to eliminate the brambles, but they have taken over a substantial section of our planting and we need to push them back somewhat. (We would love to eliminate the rose, but we have sense enough not to put that on our spring agenda.) As for the item that was on the agenda, Lisa reports that we can check it off. The rose and brambles are down and “the kids were great! I actually had to stop them and tell them to go home.” All finished. At least for now.

Lisa, from afar, sows wild-collected native grass seed at the base of our River of Grass at Meadowood.

February 24: We started work on another little patch of meadow at the BLM’s Meadowood Recreation Area! Lisa and Nikki sowed over 12 pounds of seed from seven native grass species around the recently constructed stormwater catchment pond in our Ecological Display Site. This area will eventually become a small, wet meadow—a kind of complement to the bigger and largely upland meadow plots we delineated yesterday. Jinx Fox of the BLM came out to help spread straw over the seeds for protection. All of the seed was collected from local meadows and carefully processed by the Sangha and dozens of very patient volunteers. The pond area itself had been sculpted into the landscape by the BLM, in collaboration with the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District; it forms the base of our site’s “River of Grass” drainage feature. Even though the area was muddy and slippery, there was a warm breeze in the air. Nikki reports that she and Lisa had a blast!

At Meadowood, Lisa Bright (at left) and Jinx Fox look at a section of field that we plan to restore to native meadow beginning this spring. The project will create more habitat for many native plant and animal species, some of them uncommon in our area.

February 23: Lisa, Chris, and BLM officials Jinx Fox, Jeff McCusker, and their colleagues began flagging meadow-restoration plots in a 17-acre field at Meadowood. This field is one of the areas that we will start restoring to native meadow this spring, as part of a project funded in part by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. In the photo, Lisa (at left) and Jinx look out over the area we’re flagging. It looks so, well, blank—doesn’t it? It’s not. Despite the tabula rasa appearance, this area is in the grip of tough Eurasion fescue grasses, introduced for grazing, as well as various other invasive alien plants that aren’t visible at present because the field has been mowed. Coaxing a native meadow back out on to this site is going to be an enormous challenge. If you live in the DC area, we could really use your help. Please consider volunteering!

Christmas fern, bracken, and a species of woodfern in our indoor “fern lab.”

February 16: Our fern experiments are going well. During the winter, Chris has been experimenting with production techniques for these important plants, to relatively successful effect, as you can see here. This photo shows some flats—actually they’re restaurant “clam shells”—containing fern “prothalli.” Prothalli are the little forms that sprout from fern spores. They don’t develop into ferns directly; instead, they produce gametes (sex cells) that, when fertilized, give rise to the form that we recognize as a fern. Ferns are among the plants that are hard to handle out at our nursery. Because of their complicated life cycle, it’s difficult to mass-produce them in the field, which is why Chris set up an indoor fern lab! Chris reports success with three species to date, so we’re off to a good start.

Board member Bruce Engelbert (foreground) and two high-school students cut into invasives in the Native Arboretum’s southern forest.

February 6: Lisa Bright, Sangha Board Member Bruce Engelbert, and two high-school students spent Sunday morning at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project, where they continued our work along the edge of the southern forest. That’s where we had just taken down the park’s last “invasive curtain.” (See the note for January 16.) Lisa, Bruce, and company cut many of the remnant vines and began to push into the vast multiflora-rose tangle that makes up so much of this section of the park. This is not a task for the faint of heart!

JANUARY

Arlington County Master Naturalist Gary Putnam and colleague employ the “Putnam Thresher” in the interest of meadow restoration. Patent not yet pending.

January 31: This Monday, as on every recent Monday, the Arlington Master Naturalists have been hard at it, cleaning grass seed for our Wild Plant Nursery. We’ll use the seed to grow plants for our large meadow restoration projects at Meadowood and the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge. For some of our grass species, separating the seed from the stems involves a great deal of work, so Gary Putnam, one of our Arlington colleagues, devised a simple threshing apparatus. It consists of an upside-down grocery delivery tray, some bungee cords for securing the grass to the bottom of the tray, a covering, and whatever the operator chooses to use as a flail. Take a look!

Look how well Gary's invention works! That's a lot of seed.

January 31, just a few minutes later: Gary's contraption could really be a big help, as you can see from this photo. There are two native grass species of great importance to our meadow projects—broomsedge and little bluestem—and that are tediously difficult to process. We have sacks upon sacks of this stuff. It looks like "low tech" could be the answer!

Volunteers free our saplings from a bramble patch at Rutherford Park.

January 30: A dozen hardy volunteers came out with us to Fairfax County’s Rutherford Park, to help cut back bramble and multiflora rose in one of our stream buffer sites along Long Branch stream. We first planted this area in 2007. Most of the planting has done well, but over the course of the past growing season, the rose and bramble had begun to overwhelm parts of the planting. Rosa multiflora is an invasive alien species and a widespread pest of forest and meadow in the mid-Atlantic. The bramble species on this site is native, and a good thing to have. We weren’t trying to eliminate it—we just wanted to push it back a little. The volunteers took down most of last season’s bramble growth and managed to free up five or so bramble-encumbered saplings. Despite the thorny ambiance, everyone left pretty well puncture-free.

Arlington Regional Master Naturalists clean grass seed for our meadow restoration efforts.

January 24: About 20 volunteers took over the conference room of Arlington County’s Long Branch Nature Center to clean native-grass seed for our Wild Plant Nursery. This is a very labor-intensive process—there is no threshing machine available for these species!—and if we had to pay for this kind of help, we would probably be bankrupt. Propagating these grasses is a big priority for us this year, because of our expanding meadow-restoration efforts, especially those at Meadowood and Occoquan Bay. We are very grateful to Arlington Regional Master Naturalists for organizing this event!

Volunteers at work in one of Meadowood’s meadows last October. This is one of the areas covered in our new NFWF grant.

Also January 24: We are pleased to announce that the Earth Sangha has been awarded a $25,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The grant will help us create a meadow restoration program at the Meadowood Recreation Area, and launch a public on-line map and database of Meadowood’s native flora.

Meadowood is an 800-acre property located on the Mason Neck Peninsula, in southern Fairfax County, Virginia, and managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management. We have been working there since 2008 on three forest restoration projects. This new grant will allow us to begin a major initiative on the property’s ungrazed fields. (About 600 acres of Meadowood are forested; most of the rest are ungrazed field.) All that space means that Meadowood has considerable potential for meadow restoration. Such restoration is important to local conservation because meadows are among our most species-diverse plant communities, and because relatively few large, good-condition meadows remain in our region. Much of our meadow effort will involve the control of invasive alien plants, and the reestablishment of appropriate native meadow plants.

The on-line map will allow both professional and amateur naturalists to view and plot native plants occurrences on an accurate, local scale. The resource will be launched for Meadowood, then extended to other plant communities in the region. Over the long term, the map should make it easier to track the ecological effects of various important environmental stresses, such as climate change, the spread of invasive alien species, and habitat fragmentation.

The grant was awarded to us under the Native Plant Conservation Initiative. The grant requires us to make a minimum match (from sources other than the federal government) of at least $84,164. Most of our match will be in the form of volunteer hours—and we hope that some of your hours will be among them. This is an ambitious project, and we’re really going to need your help!

The curtain falls! Lake Braddock High School students remove the last “invasive curtain” at the Native Arboretum.

January 16: It was cold this Sunday morning, but that didn’t deter our 19 volunteers, most of them Lake Braddock High School students, from coming out to the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project. We removed the Preserve’s last remaining large-scale invasive curtain. “Curtain” in this context refers to heavy growth of invasive alien vines on trees at woodland edges. The growth can become so heavy that it eventually pull the trees over. Over the past couple of years, we had removed all the curtains at the Preserve except for the one at the south end of the main lawn. Thanks to our cold-hardy volunteers, that one is now gone too! Now what? Read on ...

An invasives-control test plot at the Native Arboretum. This one has worked pretty well; it consists of five layers of heavy paper.

Also January 16: We are preparing what we hope will be a substantial expansion of our invasives-control effort at the Native Arboretum. As part of that effort, we’re planning to open up a new front in the forest south of the main lawn. That’s where the volunteers just cut back the curtain. (See the note above.) But in order to expand our control efforts, we will need to improve our efficiency: We are trying to work out some additional invasives-control techniques that will allow us to cover ground more quickly. We need procedures that can be done easily by volunteers, that are safe, that work well, and that are as cost-effective as possible. Of course, there is an extensive literature on invasives control—but reading is one thing and doing is another, so we decided to test some possibilities ourselves. During 2010, we set up a series of test plots in the southern section of the Preserve’s forest to gauge the suppressive effect of various coverings that are either easily removable or completely biodegradable. We now have a rough scale of effectiveness; we’ll combine that information with pricing, and we hope we’ll be able to put the results to work this spring.

Volunteers crowd into Meadowood’s offices to clean copious amounts of native grass seed, to help restore Meadowood’s meadows.

January 9: About 35 volunteers, mostly students from Lake Braddock and Fairfax High Schools, spent this Sunday morning at Meadowood cleaning seed of two important native-grass species (little bluestem and deer tongue). Meadowood’s BLM staff generously allowed us to use one of their “office houses” for our seed operation, since it was far too cold to work outdoors. Volunteers packed the place—but even so, it was a quiet and focused activity. Cleaning grass seed is not easy. For the little bluestem especially, you have to tease all the fluffy seeds out of each stem, one stem at a time. And if you’re not careful, the feather-like seeds tend to float away, thanks to their amazing wind-dispersal adaptations. Capturing them in a bag required a lot of attention! Lisa said that “after three hours, the cleaned seeds could make one nice pillow. Now, we only have to make 50 more pillows!” (Lisa’s idea of a joke.) In April, we will sow all these seeds in thousands of little pots, and once they’re sprouted, we’ll transplant them into the meadows of Meadowood!

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