As part of our Nature is for Everyone program this year, we have focused on making stewardship more accessible to children, youth, and families. So, we were excited to have the 33rd Kerrisdale Scouting group offer to help us remove invasives at 2 Invasive Pull events.
The first Invasive Pull took place this past Saturday, March 15, 2-3:45pm. The event was led by Free the Fern Executive Director, Grace Nombrado, with support of co-leads, Cole Reintsma and Genevieve Finn. 29 scouts (10-14 year olds), 3 venturers (15-17 year olds), and 5 scout leaders came together to help at the Douglas Fir Teaching Garden.
Grace welcomed everyone at the garden and shared a bit about the Champlain Heights Trail and how it is one of our last remaining native forests. She also shared how we consider our stewardship effort to be an reconciliation, as we remove invasive species that were brought with colonization, and restore native plants once used for medicine and food by the local xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
To make the event a bit fun, we invitied the youth to choose a team to be on, based on the species they would be removing. So, there was “Team Ivy” (led by Grace & Genevieve) and “Team blackberry” (led by Cole). We were grateful to have a variety of gloves available for the youth, in many sizes, thanks to a community grant from the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation.
After dividing into our teams, we headed south, down the Red Alder Trail, to just beside the playground. Each team received a demonstration of how to remove the invasive plant, before getting to work at removing the species. Thanks to the incredible hard work of all the volunteers, each team succeeded in filling 3 green bins and one tarp each with invasive plants! So, in total we succeeded in clearing 2520 L of invasives! Many of the youth were impressed by how long some of the ivy vines were and how large some of the blackberry root balls could be!
After removing ivy and blackberry, the youth volunteers helped with clean-up, wheeling the green bins and a garbage bin, back up the trail and wiping all the dirt off the shovels and pruners. Each volunteer demontrated such a great scouting spirit!
Thank you so much to all the Scouts & Venturers for their help! We also are grateful for the generous donation provided nonprofit for organizing the event. We look forward to welcoming the younger Beavers (5-7 year olds) and Cub Scouts (8-10 year olds) to the trail in May.
