A Note from our Stewardship Team

At the Stewardship program, we are thinking about all of the great moments that we had together planting Snowberry and Red Flowering Currants (which you may have noticed look extra pink these days!) during our wonderful Stewardship Saturdays in 2020. We would like to thank you for all of the support at our events this year. With your help, over 10,000 native plants were added to the watershed! Although we have canceled the remaining Stewardship Saturday events for winter/spring 2020, we hope to reschedule many of these events for this summer and fall when it’s safe for us to hang out and play in the dirt again. Particularly, we hope to reschedule the Wilkes Creek Headwaters/Natural Area and the Baltimore Woods events, so keep an eye out for an announcement in the future.

We are very fortunate that most of this season’s planting had already been finished. We were able to get CSWC and our partner Wisdom of the Elders to plant most of our remaining sites before the Shelter in Place order came into effect, while we created plans to care for the remaining plants until next fall. The Council has always put the safety of our community first, and hope that we can all come together for the betterment of the Slough again soon.

As with much of the Council’s programming, our stewardship work is centered around bringing people together to enhance and learn about the slough. One of the silver linings of this crisis is discovering new ways to do that! We plan to release information about how you can steward your own space, or learn about the watershed within the safe confines of social distancing and self quarantine. One of the most effective ways to improve the watershed from home is to create a rain garden. In the coming weeks, we will provide you with the technical knowledge on how to do so, and also provide a few plants to get you started! As you gaze out your windows, it is apparent that spring has sprung. If you ever wondered, “What is that flower?” or “How does this plant interact with the world around it?” we hope to answer those questions through a series of blog and social media posts in an effort to keep us all curious and learning through the isolation of social distancing. Also, this summer and fall we plan to incorporate some new volunteer events that work well in smaller groups, like native seed collections and small group paddle clean ups. While the stewardship program continues to dream up new ways to enhance and protect the Columbia Slough and its communities during our new found home time, we hope that you stay safe and healthy!

Sincerely,

Max Samuelson

Interim Stewardship Director