Greenbelt Trail Lovers:

We are gearing up for our fifth annual “It’s My Park Day” event, sponsored by the Austin Parks Foundation. On Saturday, April 12, from 9-1, we will join volunteers from all around the city who will be working to improve their neighborhood parks. The Greenbelt Guardians are sponsoring projects at both the Gus Fruh Trail and the Homedale Trail for this event. To sign up, please do two things:

1) rsvp directly to this email, stating which trail you wish to work on, and
2) also register at the Austin Parks Foundation website, for either the Barton Creek Homedale Trail or the Gus Fruh Trail. The Austin Parks Foundation will use these registrations to determine how many of what size free tee-shirts to provide, plus the quantity of snack foods needed to keep us all happily productive.

The Gus Fruh team will be hauling granite, spreading and packing it, on the top portion of the trail, to complete the trail resurfacing project. They will also remove invasive ligustrum and nandina plants along the creekside trail, and organize the debris into erosion control windrows. There are also a couple of cedar rails to repair and some stockpiling of stones near the retaining wall project by the swimming hole, plus trash pick-up.

The Homedale team will doing some more regrading of the entry trail, to direct the water flow across the trail instead of down the middle. We also have some selective weeding to do in the trail entry bed, pulling the ragweed and leaving the sunflowers. There are stumps to remove and rubble rock clearing on the switchback trail. In the new clearing by the creekside, there are still plenty of ligustrum to wrestle out of the ground and restoration activities to do in our research plot. Lots of people have been partying and leaving their beer cans, bottles, and snack food wrappers behind – we’ve got “picker-uppers” and trash sacks for the trash collectors.

We hope to have a big showing for this very festive occasion. Plants are leafing out and blooming, sweet scents are wafting in the air. Come out and celebrate the greenbelt with us!

Glee Ingram
Greenbelt Guardian Coordinator
gleeful@earthlink.net