Summer Volunteer Days

 

The summer days are a great time to visit Garber Park. The tall oak trees, maples, and buckeyes help create a cool and refreshing environment where you can sit and enjoy the park. (Photo on the left is Wyllie, our stewardship lead, gazing at the tall trees while carrying a bag full of tools for our volunteer day). Right now we are seeing many butterflies flittering among the horsetails, a few banana slugs crossing the main trails, and many birds chirping and swooping down to eat blackberries. Summer is a time where we focus our efforts towards helping make the park more fire-safe by removing dead and dry debris, and invasive plants before they go to seed.

We'd like to send a shout out to our volunteers who joined us this season and helped remove many invasive plants such as poison hemlock, thistles, ehrharta grasses, French broom, and more! Volunteers helped weed invasive thistles from around previously caged young oaks, cut up and dug up prickly invasive blackberry, and pulled long strands of invasive English ivy and Algerian ivy from many areas in the park.

We removed larger pieces of dry Eucalyptus bark, raked a good amount of fallen Eucalyptus leaves, and bagged as many pods as possible in green waste bags. (Photo to the right: one of our returning volunteers bagging seed pods, leaves, and larger bark pieces from underneath a very large Eucalyptus tree). And, thanks to our very kind Garber Park neighbors, who volunteered to take some of our bags with their green waste, we were able to remove much of this debris off-site.

We were also joined by returning volunteers who helped us open up the main trails in our lovely horsetail meadow. We cleared the paths from invasive grasses like ehrharta grass, invasive blackberry, and thistles. Some of our paths became quite narrow and our volunteers worked hard to help widen them and uncover our benches. This is a fun activity for many folks who enjoy using shovels and other digging tools like the hori-hori. If you're interested in helping us continue this project, join us on our upcoming volunteer days. We will be continuing this trail work and using mulch to help make the paths easier to walk on. We look forward to meeting many of you and seeing our returning volunteers each time. (Photo below is Bob, one of our returning volunteers, helping us widen one of the main trails in Horsetail Meadow).

If you're unable to make it out to our Saturday workdays, you can always adopt-a-spot in Garber Park. Come out on a different day and bring your friends along with you. We will provide tools and gloves, and share with you some of the skills we've learned to continue stewarding the park. It's always great for us to meet new people and see our returning volunteers every time. Just send us an email and we can get you started. We encourage you to get out and take a small walk in the park and enjoy exploring the outdoors! (Photo below from left to right: Wyllie holding a pile of invasive grasses and prickly invasive blackberries; Janet, one of our returning volunteers, helping widen the main trails with the help of a shovel).

Visit our Volunteer Opportunities page for our upcoming volunteer days.

Tour our Plant Highlights page to learn more about some of the plants growing in the park! 

Send us an email at gpstewards@gmail.com to join our newsletter and receive the upcoming event details.

As we start 2024 and look back at 2023!

 

Happy New Year!

2024 has arrived!

 

2023 saw Garber Park Stewards hold 27 volunteer days with 224 volunteers for a total of 702 hours in the park! Thank you all for a very successful year and we look forward to trying to exceed that number as our goal for this year, and I think we've had a pretty strong start.

 With the January rains and some winds we started this year by doing some trail work, uncaging some older oaks and caging some smaller oaks. If you walk up the Alvarado entrance of the park you'll notice that we cleared fallen Eucalyptus debris and mulched the trails to make for a more comfortable and accessible walking experience! This was all thanks to our regular volunteers and a lot of new faces when we had our MLK Day of Service! 

January 15th, MLK Day of Service

We started the day with a few goals in mind, but we were able to exceed those expectations with a total of 19 volunteers! We separated into two groups, one that was going to work on Eucalyptus removal and mulching up at the top of the Alvarado entrance, and another that was going to be focused on uncaging some oaks that had outgrown their cages and transfer them to some smaller baby oaks to give them a better chance to thrive in the park.

The Alvarado group ended up filling 21 green waste bags, which were generously removed by the City of Oakland, thank you Oakland! They then mulched all along the trail leading to the Horsetail Meadow, where they were also working to widen the path in a few places that it had started to narrow. It now feels very nice and is back to being a comfortable walk, where you don't have to worry about tripping on your feet!

Volunteers are working to increase the path width to make for a more comfortable walking experience through Horsetail Meadow. 

Our second crew started the morning by uncaging a group of oaks and other native plants near the Evergreen Lane entrance that had grown enough to not need the cage anymore. We then cut up this larger cage into sections big enough to use on a patch of smaller oak trees where a large oak tree had fallen the year before. We thought this would be a good activity to celebrate the holiday, by giving these baby oaks the chance to grow and live a full life and to be able to keep the legacy of the fallen oak going!

Volunteers work to remove the cage around a group of native plants that have outgrown the need for it. 

We put cages around smaller oaks and other native plants to help protect them from browsing by deer and other animals. Especially in drought years, deer will sometimes browse on the young fresh leaves of oaks, which can cause them to have stunted growths, but by caging we remove that potential limiting factor so they can have a chance to grow for their fullest. I have seen an oak tree that is five years old stay only a foot or two tall without being caged, but after being protected, grow to four or five feet within two years, to a height where we can remove the cage and not worry as much.

The oak caging team at the end of the day, having placed protection on 11 young oak trees.

Overall, we had an amazing January an are already at 75 hours of volunteer time for the year! We also wanted to highlight one of our native mollusks that came and joined the fun for a bit; the banana slug! Please watch your step in this wet weather, as they are out and about on the trails and we don't want any of these little creatures getting stepped on, so please watch your step on the trail and step carefully!

Banana Slugs (most likely Ariolimax columbianus) are roaming(gliding?) the trails of Garber Park! These large mollusks are coming out and enjoying the winter rains and the wet environment they bring! As you walk around the park, keep an eye out for these slugs that can grow up to 10" long, as you don't want to accidentally squish any!

Come join us on our upcoming Volunteer Days on the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month as we continue restoring areas of Garber Park to be better suited for native species, and in doing so, creating a more fire safe park for everyone. 

If you'd like to volunteer with us visit our Volunteer Opportunities page for more information and if you'd like to join our mailing list please email Wyllie at gpstewards@gmail.com.     

Take a look at our past events

Fun Snapshots of our Restoration Efforts at Garber Park 

MLK Day of Service: Seeds of Hope

Plant Highlights at Garber Park