Planting trees on Make a Difference Day

Hidden Valley Regional Park, Nevada – Other than the big cotton wood trees that line the banks of the Truckee River, Reno doesn’t really have any native trees. Yet, if you look down on the city from the surrounding hills or mountains you’ll see trees scattered everywhere. As the economic woes of this country hit our local Parks and Recreation Departments, volunteers are needed more than ever to help plant those trees.

All those trees make Reno a nicer place to live, a healthier place to live. In fact, I’d venture to say that trees make anywhere a nicer place to live. Here in Washoe County, the Department of Regional Parks and Open Space helped get a grant from AT&T and the National Arbor Day Foundation of 200 trees by recycling over 14,000 lbs. of old phone books. The only problem was that the parks department had it’s annual budget cut by 60% this past year, from $9 million to $4 million. They didn’t have the man power to plant 2o0 trees at multiple sites around town.

They called on Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful to help them round up volunteers and by the time the annual Make A Difference Day on October 24th rolled around, they had to turn volunteers away. At Hidden Valley Regional Park, Rancho San Rafael, along Sparks Blvd. and a few other spots nearly 200 volunteers came out to help get the trees in the ground.

This past weekend’s event also coincided with 350.org’s International Day of Climate Action, the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history. Over 5,200 events in 181 countries commemorated the desire to return our planet’s atmospheric level of carbon dioxide back to 350 parts per million in order to sustain our environment and us. It was pretty cool to be a part of that effort.

“We couldn’t have done this without all your help,” said Lynda Nelson, planning manager for the Department of Regional Parks & Open Space. “It’s great to see so many people come out to help.”

Out at Hidden Valley, it was great to be out there helping. It was another beautiful fall day and with 4o or so volunteers to work with, we made light work of get 50 trees planted. Thanks to the tutelage of Steve Churchillo, an urban forester for the City of Reno, we took care to mix in compost around the base of the tree and plant them at the right depth so that the roots would spread out well. We watered them in and covered the base with mulch to help against the high desert sun.

I was particularly happy to be planting the trees at Hidden Valley because there’s a great, albeit somewhat strange mountain bike ride that comes out right at the park. The Hidden Valley Loop was one of my first introductions to Reno and to be honest with you it kind of creeped me out with the amount of trash on the early part of the trail and then looking down on the city as something out of a Mad Max movie.

When you get right down to it, all of our cities, towns and counties need to be cleaned up and filled with new plants and trees. Just this fall Life More Natural has been involved with projects with Friends of Nevada Wilderness, The Nature Conservancy, Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful and many other organizations to help make Washoe Valley a more sustainable place to live.

For me, getting out to help has not only been rewarding for the people I’ve met and the sunny days I’ve enjoyed, it’s made the challenges we face a global community seem a little less scary. If each of us gets out and does our part, we can clean things up in a hurry. Seeing so many volunteers come out to help plant trees made me feel like maybe there’s hope for us after all.