More clearing

This week, we continued clearing paths of weeds and we went a little further. We're slowly making our way to the east slopes which I know from previous years are still in bad need of care.

I worked on a huge patch of stinging nettle and it feels so good to chop that off. We try to clear as much as possible of it because groups of children walk along the paths at Riverdale and it's really not fun to be stung by this nasty plant.

Stinging nettle


All chopped off

At least, not everything is invasive and non native. There is also a silver maple along the path, which is nice to see.

I also remember last year working on a patch of Canada Thistle. It's back this year but there doesn't seem to be as much.

Canada Thistle

The best part of the evening was that we finally saw some wood ducks. We had been looking for them since the beginning of the season because we spotted them once of twice last year. We don't see them very often. We only saw a female with ducklings, it'd be nice to see a male some day as they are very colorful.

A female wood duck with ducklings.

This week's turnout was great, 14 people showed up. You can get a lot done in just about one and a half hour.

Clearing out the paths

This week, we focused on a couple of the paths in order to remove invasives. In addition to garlic mustard, we worked on burdock, stinging nettle and DSV. I talked about dog-strangling vine a year ago in my blog.


The pile of cut plants is getting higher and bigger.
A couple of years ago, we used to bag a lot of the plants we cutted but now, we just pile it up in a corner for pick up at a later date. At least this way, we can measure our progress.


This year, we also decided to monitor the level of water in the ponds. Apparently, this is something they used to do a few years ago. We don't know how accurate this measuring stick is or if it's slowly sinking in the mud but we're checking on it every week nevertheless.

Tree planting

Now that we removed most of the garlic mustard on the slope where we've been working for the past 3 weeks, we were able to do a planting. We planted pretty much the same trees as last year, eastern hemlock, white pine, dogwood and also sugar maple and chokecherry. About 12 people showed up so the planting went quickly.


Let's get going


Now we can see a little more clearly without all the GM


Great team work


Hope the trees won't mind the slant too much


Sugar maple, my favourite.


One dedicated steward also removed more garlic mustard after she finished planting.