holyoutlaw

This spring, the Parks Department gave North Beach Park 1/4 acre of invasive plant clearance on steep slopes, an area volunteers are not allowed to work. I’ve always assumed it was a liability issue, which I think now is only partly the case. I now see it as a skill set issue as well.

I forgot about it until I was asked to review the contract a couple weeks ago. In the meantime, I had allowed a group of volunteers… um… to work on some steep slopes in the very area the crew was being contracted to work. Which caused some confusion we’re still resolving.

In the last week, the crew has come in and done some erosion control and some new invasion removal.

Here’s a side view of some of the erosion control on the Headwaters Bowl slope.

The jute netting is rolled down the hill. Successive stretches of netting are stitched together. At the top of the slope, a narrow trench is dug, and the netting staked into it with 2×2 stakes. This is covered up when the trench is reburied.

There were some restoration plantings at the top of the slope that they worked around. They also preserved some restoration plantings at the bottom of the slope. (After taking this picture, we mulched around the plants.)

Here’s a side view of the HWB slope erosion control. It’s steeper than it looks from this angle. The wood and branches are laid on the jute to weight it down. Here is a view of the slope before removal, with some workers at the bottom to give a sense of scale.

The crew also did some work in another area of the park, even steeper, the North Slope.

You can see the stitching a little better in this picture. The coir log is laid across horizontally to absorb any street run off from 90th St/25th Ave.

Here’s a side view of the North Slope work.

It looks like this slope is even steeper than the Headwaters Bowl slope.

And here is the trash the crew got off the North Slope.

This seems about right, a few bags of cans’n'bottles, some fencing, a couple tires.

The full set of ten pictures is on Flickr.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

The usual details:

• Saturday, January 26, 9 a.m. to noon
• Meet at the main entrance to the park, 90th st. and 24th Ave. NW.
• Wear mud boots and weather-appropriate layers that can get dirty. We’ll provide tools, gloves, and guidance.
• Parking available north of 90th and east of 24th. Metro Route #61 stops near the park northbound.
• Bring your own water and snacks.

Pictured here: Cascara, vine maple, silver spruce, tapered rush (for the wetlands) and others.

This month’s work party will be run by Drexie Malone and Tad Anderson, and they have a variety of plants ready for you to help place into the park. The plants come from Swansons Nursery‘s “Trees for Salmon” Program, the Parks Department, and private donations. Some are being introduced to the park, and others exist only because of previous restoration planting. Some are already found in the park growing wild.

Join us for what is likely to be the last planting work party of the season. Planting is part of the reward for the earlier work of removing invasives.

Can’t make a work party? Please consider donating to the Seattle Parks Foundation, which provides fiscal sponsorship to North Beach Park. Your donation to them is tax deductible and will go towards park projects. Click here to read about the park and donate.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

This morning Drexie and I put about five hemlock trees into various places in the park. We didn’t take pictures of all five, but this one in particular was so amusing to us I thought I’d share.

It’s not very apparent from this photo, but this tree is planted directly into a nurse log. This is, in fact, a situation in which you’ll see hemlock trees growing in the wild, so this just might work. This log may have been on the ground for decades. There was enough actual dirt where we planted the tree to give its roots good coverage.

The other places we planted hemlocks were also close to much coarse woody debris and rotted wood. And then the rains started up again! So they’ll get a good watering now, as well.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

What first attracted me to North Beach Park was the trash in amongst the weeds. This bucket was uncovered during the June work party. That’s an ivy root rising out of the bucket.

The tree the ivy rose towards was so covered in ivy the little area looked like a jungle. Now it’s much more open and pretty.

This picture encapsulates the idea of “Nature Intrudes.” Nature will break through, not always in ways that humans like or judge as pretty. But it will break through.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.