Friends of Boggy Creek : 2014

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul." ~ John Muir

In our neighborhood we're fortunate to have both and celebrated that fact in May by coming together for another Friends of Boggy Creek Potluck. The picnic blanket overflowed with blueberry and raspberry muffins, breakfast tacos, coffee, Moroccan mint tea, sausage, melon, cheese, crackers, blackberries & a peach tart. Even more important than all of the delicious food was the company. We setup by the graceful log laying in lush San Augustine grass near the creek and watched neighbors stroll or cycle over bringing food and stories to share.

Together we marveled at one neighbor's talent at cycling with his dog's leash attached to the handlebars, laughed when a very young neighbor deciding to "water" a tree, shared stories and frustration about home improvement projects and talked about our hopes for the park and the neighborhood. Some of the more energetic neighbors played tag around the "Dazzle House" art installation or practiced balancing and dismounting from the log.

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We left the park both full of food and with a stronger sense of community.

"Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing." ~ Rollo May

We started 2014 out with a BANG! Well lots of bangs really as shovels, TX toothpicks and pick mattox shoved their way into the ground and hit lots of stones along the way. On Saturday, January 25, 2014 we were fortunate to be a "Ready, Set, Plant!" site. The program is a partnership between TreeFolks and the City of Austin Parks and Recreation and Watershed Protection Departments. In response to the 2012 drought they moved away from planting as many large containerized trees and more towards small native bare root saplings. The bare root saplings take fewer resources, especially water to get established. While there is a higher mortality rate than large trees with an irrigation system when you plant 700 in one morning you can avoid to lose a few.

Here's a short video about bare root saplings that was filmed at Bartholomew Park just north of us last year. So it was a beautiful sight when dozens of volunteers gathered on a chilly morning to add 700 bare root saplings to our Hargrave Tributary Grow Zone.

Signing In

Orientation

Our Very Own Austin (wearing his TreeFolks Board of Directors hat) and Staryn (wearing his Watershed Protection Department Environmental Scientist hat) helped educate the crowd.

Parks and Recreation Staff gave a planting demo (but they cheated a bit and pre-dug a hole because our ground is so darned compacted) :-)

Then we got to work prying/poking/grunting our way to make little holes in the earth, dunk a bare root sapling in water, put it carefully into its new home, press the earth around it & put a flag beside it to help find it when it was watering time at the end. They were planted on 3' centers and even if only 10% survive we'll still have 70 beautiful natives along our creek to help slow water down, filter pollutants, and provide shade. Our natives were red mulberry, cedar elm, burr oak, hackberry , green ash, black locust, flameleaf sumac, & aromatic sumac. Won't it be fun when we can harvest mulberries in a few years?!