Short Summary

Garber Park is a 13-acre wildland park owned by the City of Oakland located behind the Claremont Hotel in Claremont Canyon. Garber Park is home to significant stands of big-leaf maple, California buckeyes and regenerating coast live oak woodland and forest. The Garber Park Stewards vision is to safeguard the native wildland resources of Garber Park while reducing the risk of wildfire and improving the trail system.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

SEVENTH GRADERS MEET NEWTS AND CAPE IVY

For our regular first-Tuesday workday in April, the Garber Park Stewards and our Botanist, Lech Naumovich, were happy to host about 20 Head Royce seventh graders and their instructors,  and happier still to extract from them two hours of labor in the meadow pulling cape ivy.  We set up three work sites with tarps for collecting the pulled stems, and we stood back and let them at it.
They pulled and pulled, found a newt,  pulled some more, and had a contest to see who could pull the longest stem, and pulled some more, and bagged the piles of stems, and carried the bags to our collection point.  


They also found out that the cape ivy in the meadow covered up a lot of things including lots of blackberry plants, both native and Himalayan--they both have thorns--and stinging nettles, and giant vetch which is in bloom right now, and lots of oddly segmented horsetails just high enough now to assess how high they will have to get in order to rule the meadow this summer.  Six feet probably.  In the end 20 Head Royce seventh graders can make quite a dent in cape ivy.  
We had fun, we pulled cape ivy, and we want those seventh graders back for an encore performance. There are still great expanses of cape ivy left to vanquish.
For more pictures click here.
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