Upcoming Work Day: Saturday, July 9, 8:00 a.m. to noon, at Homedale Trail
For our mid-summer work day, we are planning a shorter work day that starts earlier, and will be planning for most of our tasks to take place in the shaded areas of the trail. We wore ourselves out last year, and want to be gentler on ourselves this time!
We will have on site: cold drinks, energy bars, sun screen lotion, and poison ivy protection. There are also a few free t-shirts from our last work day available. Our volunteers need to be sure to: wear protective clothing and a hat, proper work shoes, bring work gloves and their own water bottle to keep close at hand.
We will be doing weed control, some trail edging with cedar logs, continuing the repairs of the rock retaining walls for our bridge, and some trail resurfacing work. We will also be sending out ?scouts? into the woods to tag with bright colored ribbon the very large ligustrum trees that are responsible for the continuous re-seeding of this invasive species. Rene Barrera, of the City?s Land Preserve Division, has agreed to partner with us and have his crew cut down or ?girdle? these larger specimen trees, and treat them so they are less likely to resprout. That will be a great boon in reducing the future populations.
We hope to have a good showing of volunteers for this event. If you haven?t joined us yet, it?s a community adventure. Come add to the great collaborative spirit that has emerged around this wonderful place. Please RSVP to: gleeful@earthlink.net so we can plan appropriately.
Recent Work Day Report
On April 23, the BHNA-Greenbelt Guardians participated in the city-wide ?It?s My Park Day!? sponsored by the Austin Parks Foundation. On that day, 33 parks around town received the caretaking attention of some 940 volunteers.
We had a total of 60 volunteers show up to donate some 210 hours of time on our Greenbelt trails! The trails were crowded with the traffic of busy volunteers. Our neighbors turned out in generous numbers, plus the Community Service kids from Travis County Juvenile Probation, an enthusiastic group of Cub Scouts, and some Community Service students from U.T.
Because we were receiving help from the Austin Parks Foundation in recruiting for volunteers, we got more ambitious in our scope of work this time. For the first time, we worked both trail heads, Gus Fruh and Homedale, on the same day, which required more elaborate planning and participation by our expanding leadership team.
We completed the ambitious trail renovation project that we had started on our last work day at Gus Fruh. The remainder of the cross-drain swales were excavated and packed; stone & gravel cachement basins were constructed; and the entire trail was resurfaced with decomposed granite and then compacted. Lots of muscle power and endurance went into the effort. The results are spectacular and transformative. Peace, safety, and aesthetics reign on the once rutted and eroded trail.
The overgrown Homedale trail entry was opened up and cleared and widened, yielding a much more expansive trail entry. The large natural stone steps and retaining wall at the bottom of the trail onto the ?rock flats? by the creek, were completed, and the retaining walls in the arroyo supporting our new bridge were repaired.
Both trails got cleared of sticker weeds and invasive grass, and rock borders were straightened and repaired. The invasive ligustrum and nandina plants got our enthusiastic weed wrench treatment at both trail sites. And sacks of weeds and garbage were hauled away.
Special thanks go to the dedicated contributions of our neighborhood Greenbelt Guardian Team Leaders for this work day: Stan Ostrum, Robbin Trusty, Tim Steckler, Scott and Janet Byers, Robin McKeever, Kay Kennedy, Nancy Koch, and Ken and Rosalie Russell. And of course, our PARD Partner, John Cook, can?t be recognized enough times for his dedication and knowledge and true partnership in this endeavor.
Glee Ingram
