Volunteering, etc.

This fall the volunteering in my life really picked up. I signed up to do Wordstock where I will be helping out as a stage assistant, and I've done two work parties for the Nature Conservancy so far. I also signed up to be a SMART volunteer which means that I go to an elementary school once a week and read to two little kids. It's way more fun than I thought it would be.

I am typically not a person who likes to do hard labor (especially for free), but I have to say that for some reason I find tons of expendable energy when it comes to doing things for the environment. Earlier this month I went with a group from the Nature Conservancy to the Camassia preserve. If you haven't been there, I highly recommend it (in spring there's an amazing blanket of wildflowers throughout). It's a small plot of oak savannah that the conservancy bought way back when there were no houses in that area. Since then, the residential neighborhoods have grown around it, and houses can be seen from almost anywhere inside the preserve. The task I had to help complete was spreading compost over a small area where they are planting some hedges to keep out the trash that floats in from the neighboring apartment complex. I was sore for about three days.

The second work party I went to I took my good friend Josie, and we had a blast. We went to the Kingston preserve near Stayton. The caretakers have been working very hard to bring this area back to its original state by eliminating the invasive species and harvesting the seeds of the native ones. They do this in a number of ways including controlled burns, but on this particular day we were lopping the heads off of Queen Anne's Lace and collecting the fluffy seeds of some kind of aster.

Here are some photos from that day:

I liked the way this lichen contrasted with the drab of the fall prairie.

I don't know what this plant is, but I like the fluffy, curly seeds.

We were collecting the seeds of this plant.

Just another sign of the times...