More Along the Trail

Two weeks ago, we widened the sheet mulched area next to the injured cedar. By falling, the poplar injured but did not completely demolish the cedar. But as far as I can tell, it took down a hazel. Where that hazel once grew, I have no idea but there were broken limbs with catkins scattered all around this area. Anyway, we finished freeing the lower branches of the cedar on the west side.

Unfortunately, there wasn't anything we could do about the branches on the east side due to the poplar logs that were too big for us to move or saw with our hand saws so we called an end to the project for the morning. Walking out of the park, I noted that leaves had emerged on all the Indian plums along the trail--a sure sign of spring.

Today, Jim and I returned to the same spot. I had asked Tony H. (Parks Department) if he could chainsaw the large logs and he did. This allowed us to finally free the branches on this side. The before and after photos are below. I should also have taken a photo of the sheet mulched area since that is now piled high with broken cedar limbs, the hazelnut tree in various pieces and pieces of poplar. Some of the branches on the cedar look quite questionable but we are not trained arborists so we left them as is and I'll mention it to Tony.

Also, this morning before we worked along the trail, we took a quick walk to the Southern Forest. We noticed someone had built a bridge with branches over the water-filled gully. We dismantled the bridge. (There also seemed more downed limbs piled in the area but we didn't stick around to think that through.) The plants from the 2015 fall planting in the Southern Forest were doing quite well as well as the plants from a year ago. Also, the Indian plum is flowering.

We were at the Jobox when Cameron, who works for Parks, appeared. He is in the Master Native Plant Stewardship Training Program with Chie and me. He works with Tony H. and helped chainsaw the poplar logs and was part of the delivery team that brought us more chips. So our chip stock is now fully replenished--hooray!

I think we've done what can be done with the injured cedar. But we might take another look later. On our way out of the park, we walked through the area north of the trail. We plucked laurel and holly seedlings. Here's a small bouquet with holly, laurel and herb Robert. Over the years, we took out a lot of blackberry in this area. The last thing we did today was to clip some blackberry canes along Meridian. Our plan with that for now is for the canes to dry out in place,

Worked Along the Trail

The weather finally cooperated yesterday, although around 8:30, there was a chance of snow at 9:

We returned to the part of the Trail of Cedars where the Lombardy poplar fell on February 10. I got the date of the fall from Ray, who lives in one of the houses adjacent to the park. He had mentioned that although the trail had been cleared of the fallen tree and therefore usable, there was still quite a mess and to make the long story short, and to put it one way, I guess I sort of volunteered our services. Anyway, Jim and I weeded as much creeping buttercup in the adjacent area as we could. This area is the same as the last photo in the Feb. 26 post below. Since the buttercup in this spot hadn't spread to the stage where there was a blanket of them, it seemed like a good area to get rid of the creeping buttercup anyway.

After cardboarding the area, Jim and Gary wheelbarrowed most of our remaining mulch we had along Meridian and I started to place some of the storm debris on top. Gary is below chopping some of that into smaller pieces.

After shifting some of the broken branches, what we discovered was that some of the lower branches of a cedar had actually been pinned down by fairly large pieces of the poplar. Below is a photo of a freed branch. I think we need to return to this "project" later to assess what we did. I was glad to get some work done finally since cancelling due to weather was getting to be a drag. Around 10:30 we had a bit of hail. An hour later, there were strong gusts of wind but that didn't last so we worked until 12:30 or so.