Wetland Restoration - Service Learning

This fall quarter I have been involved in a wetland restoration project out in Woodinville on an old farm. This project was for my Restoration class taught at EDCC. I have logged 24 hours throughout the quarter working on the project with my classmates and other volunteers. The is site was infested with Himalayan blackberry, buttercup and reed canary grass on the edge of the wetland with a mixed diversity of natives plants like alder, black cottonwood, western red cedar, red twig dogwood, Pacific willow, salmonberry, lady ferns, skunk cabbage, black cap raspberry and red elderberry. The Himalayan blackberry was the biotic barrier that has inhibited natives to seed in. Our goals for the site were to completely remove the blackberry and plant natives which will provide shade to our site to eliminate the reed canary grass and buttercup over time.

Our duty's as a class were to manually remove the blackberry by cutting all growth down to a foot and digging out the root ball while removing other invasive species like english holly and english hawthorn. We put all the blackberry debris in a massive pile and put the root balls on top of the pile to let them desiccate. Based on 'polygons,' which we made up, where we categorized our site in to specific areas primarily based on soil conditions. On one side of our site there is a water seepage that comes out the hillside. This is where the buttercup has heavily infested the area where as farther north in our site the soil is drier. This helped us determine what plants we should plant where. In the seepage area myself and two other classmates made hummocks for western red cedar and sitka spruce to go on. We built kind of like a raised bed using rotten logs as the frame and filling it in with topsoil and woodchips, raising the level helps to keep the buttercup from spreading and competing with the plants we installed.

Let me go back a bit...A hummock is basically mound of dirt in which you plant into, we did this because the soil is so saturated that it has very little available oxygen which roots need. Planting into a mound gives the plant just enough room for oxygen to be available while it establishes. This was something I learned during this project that really stood out to me.

We planted a variety of natives but mostly red twig dogwood and Pacific willow because they are fast growing and create a dense canopy to shade out weeds.

We plan to incorporate woody debris for insects and animals to use. Critters were already starting to use piles of debris we made as shelter. While I was moving a pile of blackberry that had been sitting there for a few weeks I came across a home of little field mice and a salamander. I had seen a garter snake early in the quarter and numerous bird species that utilized the wetland.

Question posed: How successful will this project be? What percent of plants will die the first year? Will it be one or two species that die or will it be area dependent? How long will it take for the plants to go tall enough to create a dense enough shade to combat the weeds that are already existing and yet to come? Will there be another weedy species which seeds have been lying dormant, waiting for the blackberry to be removed?

My teacher's email is: rodney.pond@gmail.com and our 'clients' email is zs.pasztor2011@gmail.com. Zsofia is in charge of Farmer Frog, a non-profit organization which recently acquired an old dairy farm where they plan to built greenhouses and aquaponic systems for producing food.