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.