We’ll start with a brief planting demonstration led by Brad Lancaster then plant. The demonstration will show you how to plant the rain to maximize its potential, how to plant food-bearing native trees by seed and/or with nursery stock to maximize passive summer shading/cooling, and how to recycle/plant prunings and leaves as fertility-building, carbon-sequestering, pollutant-filtering, water-harvesting mulch.
End time of ten is approximate (with a good showing of folks we’ll likely finish up early).
Cost: FREE—plus your planting help
Come join us in planting native shade trees, understory vegetation, wildflowers, and seed within or beside water-harvesting earthworks in the public rights-of-way. The idea is to plant native food-producing, flood-controlling, wildlife-habitat-producing, beautiful, air- and water-filtering, living air conditioners.
Street trees that shade up to 75% of the street’s surface can also cool summer neighborhood temperatures by up to 20ºF.
This enhances the walkability and bikeability of our neighborhoods, which improves health and drops crime. When we harvest street runoff to irrigate the street trees, we reduce water consumption as we reduce downstream flooding we naturally bioremediate/filter pollutants, and help indirectly and directly recharge our groundwater. Thus far this annual event has resulted in over 1,800 trees being planted in our neighborhood/waterhood, thousands of understory plants, and contributed to annually harvesting over one million gallons of stormwater that used to go to the stormdrain—let’s keep going!
Thanks to Little John Excavating for doing the basin excavation, Churchman Sand & Gravel for catalina granite rock, neighbor Keith for the donation of urbanite, Neighborhood Foresters for the mesquite branches, and Dryland Design for doing the excellent rockwork and logwork.
What to bring: Work clothes, sun hat, gloves, and water as we’ll be working outdoors. A pointed shovel, pruning tools, and/or hard rake would also be great (and we’ll have some extra tools on hand for those lacking them).