100 Year Scouting Service Campaign Teams Up with GreenRedmond

Eagle Scout Leader Tracy (left photo) and Volunteer Land Steward Doug Schmidt (right photo) teach scouts how to plant trees.   This work party was a 100 Year Anniversary Scouting Service event.   

The weather was extremely cooperative as more than 35 boy scouts, scout leaders, fathers and some siblings gathered at Hartman Park to finish the project which had been started a week earlier. The youth were members from packs, troops, teams or crews from units 612 and 613 which meet at the LDS stake center adjacent to Hartman Park and troop, team and crew 597 from the Novelty Hill neighborhood. Although the weather was cool and crisp when they gathered at 8:00 am, the sun was soon shining down on them as they continued the process of eradicating the invasive blackberry bushes that had overtaken the area they been assigned to clean up. The youth and adults learned a very valuable lesson from GreenRedmond volunteer Doug Schmidt, the supervisor of the project. Doug instructed them that it was not enough to simply cut down the stalks and remove the roots. Even the smallest pieces of green stock needed to be removed from the area. If any were left lying on the ground, they could root out and start a new blackberry plant.

Once all the insidious plants were eradicated and a thorough sweep of the area was completed, removing any trace of the invasive plants, new trees were carefully planted throughout the section. In just a few hours, a section of the park which had been overgrown with blackberries had been transformed. Stepping back and looking at the results of their efforts, the volunteers realized there is a significant amount of work required before all of Hartman Park looks like the small area they had worked on. But for now, there was some satisfaction as they admired the transformation that just a few hours of volunteer labor was able to perform.
 
By Bruce Salmon, Volunteer for Boy Scouts of America and LDS Church
Photos by Salmon