Our annual native planting day in North Richmond is 5 years old! We couldn’t be more proud of this project, called Hope Gardens, where community members living in North Richmond adopt a garden in front of their house - the gardens are the areas in between the sidewalk and the street. Alongside community members and volunteers, we replace the area with what is often dead grass or weeds with mulch, compost and native and/or drought tolerant plants. The streets become more vibrant and the people and pollinators are happy. This year, we planted 5 gardens in the months of April and May, three of …
Friend or foe? Mistletoe’s Messy Relationship with Trees
By Paula White In my frequent trips to the Sacramento area, I have observed big clumps of mistletoe growing on large deciduous trees, especially oaks. I had heard that these trees were stressed out from the parasitic mistletoe and suffering a slow death. I even trimmed off some of the mistletoe that I could reach, thinking that I was helping the tree (and I also wanted to hang some up as a Christmas decoration). But last February while hiking in Mt. Diablo State Park, I read a fascinating article in the Mount Diablo Review by Jenn Roe that gave me a whole new perspective on mistletoe. …
What’s In Your Watershed: Time Encapsulated in Rock at Miller/Knox
By Pinkie Young Hundreds of years ago, a majority of the Bay Area’s shoreline was a mix of tidal marshes and wetlands. By the 1900’s, much of that land was drained and artificially filled to be used for industry, agriculture, and housing. My hometown of Richmond is now mostly fill, but across the street from Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline lies an outcrop of rock that tells a much, much older story. The “What’s in your Watershed” segment of our newsletter has been a longstanding channel to showcase living creatures in our local watersheds. This month, I’d like to focus on what was in …
Celebrate Earth Day with the Richmond Community
*Please help us better estimate attendance and supplies by pre-registering for Earth Day* We are excited to be celebrating Earth Day this year on Saturday, April 22 in collaboration with our community partners in North Richmond! We will be hosting a Creek Clean Up at Wildcat Creek in partnership with Urban Tilth, as well as a Native Plant Garden Planting. We are looking for volunteer partners who are interested in acting as anchor groups for our service projects! If you or your group are interested in volunteering with us, please reach out Marianella Aguirre at …
Staff Spotlight: Ethan Rayner, New Restoration Manager
The Watershed Project is excited to have a new team member, Ethan Rayner, who will take the lead on our restoration projects as the Restoration Manager! If you read a little bit about him below, it’s evident why he’s a new member of the team. What watershed do you live in and what do you like about it? I live in the Pilarcitos Creek watershed in what is now the city of Half Moon Bay, California, on the unceded land of the Ramatush Ohlone peoples. In my previous job I was the habitat restoration coordinator for State Parks in Half Moon Bay, so I lived close to work and I was …
Cisterns, Students, and Soil: Action Projects in San Francisco
By Audrey Matusich This school year marks the second year of our Youth Watershed Stewards program, a collaboration among SFUSD schools, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), Lotus Water, and The Watershed Project (TWP). The goal of this collaboration has been to fix and maintain preexisting rain cisterns at San Francisco elementary schools, allowing schools to use the cisterns not only to provide water to their schoolyard gardens, but also as a teaching tool for students to learn the importance of water conservation and benefits of green infrastructure. The photo below …
Rain and Drought Update
By Dan Kirk Have you hydroplaned yet? Canceled a trip because it’s too scary to hydroplane? Felt proud about keeping water out of your house after you learned new home flooding prevention techniques after the first atmospheric dumped on your house? Or felt the opposite - enraged at the fact that you live in a cemented over floodplain and can’t catch a break? Have you been trying to grapple with the fact that the reality of the drought in California truly sucks your soul dry and you feel a little weird to be “over the rain”? Well, if you are shaking your fist at the sky, maybe unclench …
What’s In Your Watershed? Lichen
By Maggie Chen What could be right in front of your eyes and not quite seen? … Lichen! Many people walk past lichen without knowing what they are – which is understandable since they aren’t just one life form but a combination of organisms and no two lichen are the same. As complex life forms, lichen are a symbiotic partnership of two separate organisms: a fungus and an algae. The fungus is the partner that determines the majority of the lichen’s characteristics, which could be the lichen’s thallus shape down to its fruiting bodies. The filaments from the fungus …
