Wow! What a busy month and a half at SPAWN. In May we welcomed two new Americorps Watershed Stewards Project Interns, Andrew and Claire, who now join us for every restoration and nursery day. June brought many outreach activities including our volunteer appreciation dinner, Fairfax Ecofest (where SPAWN’s salmon float took 3rd place!), SalmonAid, and the Woodacre 4th of July parade. While some of these Saturday events prevented us from performing our usual restoration, we’ve still accomplished a great deal. Recently, we’ve taken up more thorough efforts to restore the culvert at the intersection of Park Street and Redwood Drive in Woodacre as well as the SPAWN property in Lagunitas. We’ve taken out a large amount of ivy and periwinkle at both locations, and have done a TON of planting at Park St. – an area of the creek in serious need of some shade. A short visit to Roy’s Pools offers a display of the fruits of our labor. Plantings are taking off! Where there was once nothing but invasive blackberry, there is now coffeeberry, coyote brush, sticky monkey flower, bi-color lupin, hazelnut, buckeye, sweet-smelling yerba buena and more – spreading and thriving. Keeping many of our young plantings sufficiently watered throughout the summer will prove challenging, but the reward is always worth it! The next two Saturdays (july 11 & 18) we’ll be at the SPAWN Lagunitas House. Visit spawnusa.org/upcomingevents for details and directions! See you by the creek!
