The new stewardship season was off to a good start tonight. We had a turnout of 11 people, the weather was perfect (not too sunny, not too warm, no rain, no wind) and we set ourselves to attack some garlic mustard. Some of the plants already have flowers and right now at Riverdale, that's pretty much all you see. The slopes are covered with it. Stewards getting ready to pull the nasty plant from one of the slopes.
We managed to remove it from about half the slope.
Garlic mustard was introduced in North America as a culinary herb (it's edible and used in salads and pesto) and is an invasive species in much of North America and is listed as a noxious or restricted plant.
Luckily, Riverdale also has beautiful scenery that makes it all worthwhile.
Since we started early this year, we were able to admire the fields of tulips that have been planted by the Riverdale Garden Club.
And the ponds, which look decidedly poetic in the spring.
At long last, Spring is here and I can revive my blog about the Riverdale Community Stewardship program. It's great to be back after such a long and harsh winter. Tonight was orientation for the Community Stewardship program and the turnout was very good, almost double from last year. We got about a dozen stewards who signed up for the Riverdale Farm site and it's a great start. We begin the work next week and we expect that more people will probably show up.
This year, we're starting the season earlier and our first task will be to start pulling garlic mustard. This is the best time of the year to tackle it because the ground is still soft and it's easy to pull. It's also a good way to start the season without exerting ourselves too much at the beginning.
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
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.
Note: this is a cross-posting from Don Watcher. I am repeating the posting here because it happened at Riverdale Farm Ponds.
A collection of clips from the Benthic Invertebrate study at Riverdale Farm Ponds
This week I went by Riverdale Farm Ponds to participate in a study to monitor pond organisms. The point of the study was to collect benthic invertebrates from the bottom of the pond. Benthic invertebrates are a group of creatures that live in an aquatic environment and include fully developed insects; insects in a larval stage; some crustaceans; and worms and leeches. Benthic Invertebrates can be used to measure the health of a pond. Since some species are more tolerant of pollution, the presence or absence of them can be used as a general water quality gauge.
The collection process involved donning hip waders, wading into the pond and collecting samples from the bottom muck with a special scooping net. Once the samples were collected, we went up to one of the buildings and sifted through the debris looking for different creatures. During our investigation we encountered aquatic sow bugs, midges, aquatic worms, scuds, leeches, and snails. All of these are mostly pollution tolerant and the species found indicated that water quality was low, about 7 on a scale of 10 (1=pristine water, 10=absence of life).
However, there is some good news. Last year an aerator was installed to inject air into the water. Due to several longterm problems, the ponds suffer from anoxic conditions which means that not much can survive here. A similar study was done before the aerator was activated and a grand total of 8 creatures were found. This year between 50-100 organisms were found. So things are looking up for the ponds.
This coming Tuesday, August 21, the Riverdale team will be participating in another session of benthic macroinvertebrates (aquatic) testing in the sanctuary pond. This is a monitoring study which involves taking samples from the pond and collecting insects from these samples. The benthic zone is the lowest level of a body of water. It is inhabited by organisms that live in close relationship with the ground, called benthos or benthic organisms.
Once again, we will work with members of Citizens' Environmental Watch, a community-based ecological group which organizes monitoring and stewardship programs. They use benthic invertebrates or "water bugs" as biological indicators to assess water quality. In order to collect these samples, we will have to get into the pond wearing hip waders and using nets to try to pick up as many "bugs" as possible. Volunteers collecting specimens Looking for signs of life
Last night, we worked in a different spot (at least, I had never worked there). We went on the right side of the sanctuary pond where invasives are having a field day. Aynsley told me that she did some planting there a few years ago but it now needs a lot of work. There is so much stuff, we could be working there until the end of the season. It's full of japanese knotweed and there is also grapevine, which is native but extremely invasive.
The pond is a great environment for the grapevine but there is really too much of it.
The weather was uncertain at the beginning of the evening but we decided to go on anyway. After about an hour, we had to stop because it was really coming down. Still, we had 5 brave souls who showed up.
We saw these ducks but couldn't identify them. They may be just mallards. (We keep hoping we'll see the wood ducks we spotted at the beginning of the season).
