Nature Blog

This year we decided to honor the MLK holiday with an entire weekend of service projects in order to make having “a day on, not a day off” more accessible to everyone. We had three amazing days filled with perfect weather (nearly 60 degrees on MLK Day!), great attitudes, and hard working volunteers. Over the…

“What’s so bad about English ivy?” This is a fairly common question asked by newcomers to the Greenbelt, and the answer is usually preceded by a very deep breath because the list of what’s bad about English ivy is so long.As the name may lead you to believe, English ivy is not native to the…

If you think it’s hard to distinguish the native trailing blackberry from the invasive Himalayan blackberry, imagine them both covered in a layer of frost on a cold, bright morning. Luckily, we were working in a slow-growing patch of sun up at Pigeon Point Park and the frost melted away pretty quickly. We have been…

11-14-09 Party in the Park! This morning we discovered the power of positive thinking as everyone on Nature Consortium staff (and I suspect many of our work party participants) had spent the week hoping for a rain-free event. If you have been out to work with us before, perhaps you have heard buphalo say, “There…

Green Seattle Day is an annual city-wide day of service organized by the Green Seattle Partnership. Last Saturday, we at Nature Consortium hosted one of the 16 Green Seattle Day restoration sites. It was a great event! We started off the day digging up blackberry and thistle that had grown back after the initial removal,…

A sea of sixth graders (around 70 students!) from Eastside Catholic School joined us out at Pigeon Point Park today and we unleashed them on the massive blackberry bramble we battled throughout the summer. There was a lot of maintenance to be done and new ground to be gained, and this group powered through both…