A great turn-out of volunteers made the 2nd Annual Garber Park Earth Day a great success and a very bad day for invasives. Our recent plantings at the Evergreen Lane Entrance were protected from the threat of poison hemlock and Cape ivy by the team who stayed till 1:00 removing these nasty invasives. Another group went to work at the Alvarado Rd. Entrance making a big dent in the Cape ivy infestation at that site. Our Himalayan Blackberry Bashers were once again hard at work. They made a HUGE dent, not just in chopping down the blackberry-they accomplished that task a couple of months ago-but in digging out the roots. This is a tiring and difficult task, which elicited an “Awesome” from Lech when he saw the huge rootballs they had dug out.
We had a nice break from our physical labor when Lech Naumovich, botanist and restoration consultant, guided us on a walk through the park. The Stewards goal for the walk was to pre-survey Garber Park to help us identify areas and trees which we might test in our upcoming participation in the Sudden Oak Death (SOD) Blitz on April 30-May 1. This we did.
But Lech did much more than that - we are all excited about becoming "Citizen Scientists" and ready to collect information on the condition of our trees in Garber Park. We not only learned how to identify possible signs of SOD but we measured the size, and estimated the age, and assessing the health of the trees (page 3 of hand-out below). We encourage you to read the hand-out, and then join us on the SOD blitz on April 30-May 1, where we will not only collect samples but will begin our survey of the arboreal resources in Garber Park.
