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October 28 2023 Work Party
The first trees of this planting season are in new homes, tucked on the east side of Swamp Creek before it bends to find the Sammamish River. Douglas fir, Western hemlock, Grand fir, and Sitka spruce removed from pots, roots unbound and draped over mounds of soil in deep holes, rocks sifted and piled nearby, compost mixed with the earth we found and pressed firmly down. Gentle tugs at the base of 30 trunks confirm they are all securely tucked. One tree in not quite the right home. We decide to move ki a foot over, safely out of the way of passing wheelbarrows full of Himalayan blackberry and English…
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October 7 2023 Work Party
First meetings. Tree branches swoop to make swings. The forest swallows children, spits them out. A cardboard brigade. Small feet stomp mulch. The children become lost to the creek. You arrive. We begin as we left off, the mulch pile moved, canes cut, root balls dug. Pill bugs and spiders scrabble over rick, dark earth, a dear long-toed salamander travels from glove to arm on ki‘s way to safe shelter. Canes moved by clipper, the last ripe blackberries of the season foraged, a heavy chain pulled from the brambles, a crushed frying pan declared non-native. Our time together inevitably comes to a close and most of you have ridden away,…
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September 23 2023 Work Party
Digging blackberry regrowth, felling English hawthorn. Gently tending to trailing blackberry and a baby sword fern, whispering with an adolescent Western red cedar. A thin layer of compost, a generously overlapped layer of cardboard, a thick layer of mulch. Some cardboard left bare, puddles gathered. Young people with heads together, talk babbling over talk, laughter, connection, so much love bouncing from you to me to root slayers to conifers to cottonwoods, everywhere, then rain. Light at first, then heavier, it soaks us, pelts upturned faces, drips from leaves, soaks into soil, seeps into roots, grows us, grows everything.
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September 9 2023 Work Party
We push back Himalayan blackberry regrowth in preparation for layered mulching. Forsythia and boxwood are trimmed, salmonberry and elderberry discovered under weeping brambles of blackberry. The weed wrench takes a stellar turn at pulling up bamboo, ferns are liberated from canes that have been hiding in their fronds. Ivy is pulled, knotweed surveyed, trash in the creek contemplated. So much is in our care.
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September 2 2023 Work Party
Siblings, friends, a candidate, people young through middle age. More English hawthorn comes down, we reclaim ground from blackberry grow back. Humans walk through. Dogs walk through. Blackberries are plucked from cut brambles, wheelbarrows are loaded with root balls and branches, tender attention is payed to native trailing blackberry. We fill one small patch of earth with love.
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August 12 2023 Work Party
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July 29 2023 Work Party
New elders, teens known and new to each other, all new to me. You trickle in, each of you right on time, growing us from six to twenty at our peak. We disentangle layers of black plastic sheeting from roots, wrestle blackberry canes from a conifer and elderberry, activate the pungent sent of Herb Robert as we pull it from the ground. Goats arrive, stunning slot-pupilled eyes pulling us from shade to sun. Our happiness increases by 50%. In the end, reed canary grass stands tall, thistles sharp, there is a sea of blackberry before us, but there is only discernment, no discouragement. This is the work before us. We…
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July 22 2023 Work Party
You send your heartbeat 100 feet. Water sloshes from pails. You smile, your gaze steady, encouraging. I pull out tiny English hawthorn, ferret out fast-growing black locust hiding in the shade of towering cottonwoods, dig a horse chestnut on the verge of adolescence. We bear the heat and sun for the good of our first native plantings. There is refuge in the shade and in being with you.
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July 8 2023 Work Party
Nature is all around us.
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July 1 2023 Work Party
Cleaver seeds ride along. English hawthorn fall. You point out the musical clatter of dry canes and sticks as they rake across the ground. Now I delight in it, too.
