Pollination Study

I wrote my last post a couple of days ago and I realized that I had said earlier I was going to talk about the pollination study. This is a study that was performed by the stewards at all the stewardship sites throughout the summer in order to identify pollinators and the flowers they were visiting. We had forms to fill out as part of a kit and it was part of a national survey put together by Pollination Canada. We did what we could to try to identify pollinators and some stewards were better than others at the identifying test. I wasn't very good but it was interesting nevertheless. Take a look at the site to find out more about it.

Butterflies are pollinators too

Last week of stewardship

Here we are, the last stewardship session at Riverdale for this summer. We finished the season tonight by tagging invasive trees such as Manitoba Maple, Norway Maple, Black Locust and Tree of Heaven.

We put orange ribbons to mark those trees.
City workers will come to remove them. They won't remove them all but they'll decide which ones they can get rid of.

We had a pretty good turnout for the last week and some other stewards continued to remove invasive species. I must say that we haven't been able to kill all the DSV but we sure tried our best. It will be back next year but with some luck, there won't be as much. One can only be optimistic.

Cheryl found this interesting looking "thing" that was attached to the leaves of a sumach. Is anybody out there able to identify this? I apologize for the poor picture but it was getting pretty dark when I took this.

This one is not much better but maybe it can help.

Working at the site has been a lot of work but we also had much fun. I feel a little bit sad that it is now over but I'm hoping to see some of my co-stewards at one of the many planting events organized by Green Toronto this fall.