Golden Hour work parties are now meeting each Thursday evening from 7-8pm and will continue until fall as weather allows. Each Golden Hour is led by an FoBW member who chooses the work site location within the corridor. Generally, the work parties consist of freeing native plants by removing invasives or litter pick up. Golden Hour leaders are happy to help with identification of plants. Volunteers are asked to be alert to bird nesting activity and if observed avoid working nearby. Volunteers should check the FoBW website calendar for the specific meeting location. It will be posted a week in advance. Or they can email friends@FriendsofBaltimoreWoods.org to find out. Volunteers…

Friends of Baltimore Woods’ new fiscal sponsor, Oregon Wildlife Foundation (OWF), recently interviewed board chair, Barbara Quinn, and Ecologist, Laura Guderyahn, about the ecology of Baltimore Woods and the origin of FoBW.  The interview was conducted on Zoom and aired live online on April 15. It is now an archived episode of the OWF series, “Community Conservation.” The episode can be accessed here.

We enjoyed holding a work party today for one of our community partner groups, SoLVE. We met with their staff and board at the BW upper woodland portal, at St John for a tour followed by mulching plants just in time for summer heat. It was a good opportunity for them to get to know our site and to meet outside the office on a beautiful day. Thanks to everyone who joined us today!

Thanks everybody for planting 200 Asclepius speciosa (showy milkweed) at today’s volunteer work party at the Baltimore Woods meadow.

by Caroline Skinner Volunteers had fun helping at the pop up native plant sale held jointly by FoBW and Sparrowhawk Native Plants on the last weekend of March. On Thursday morning, big trucks delivered pre-ordered plants of all shapes and sizes, then workers laid them out on the ground, arranged in organized groups by type. In the afternoon, volunteers marked each and every plant with an ID tag. Yes, all 10,000 of them! For the next two days, customers came at pre-arranged time slots to pick up the myriad of native plants they had pre-ordered. The sale was a roaring success with a complete sell-out. There were about $50,000 in…

The Old Oak Tree site, below Edison Street on N Alta, is really starting to look good from a restoration standpoint. We’ve already worked there for several years, first taking out lots of trash and invasive locust trees, as well as blackberry and English Ivy. More recently, we’ve planted an assortment of native shrubs; many of them are doing well, including Osoberry and flowering red currant. We showed the site more love at our work party on March 13. While we were sad to see the site’s namesake, the old oak tree, come down in a storm this winter, sections of it’s enormous trunk remain on site, along with an…