Launching
our Native Plant Monitoring Program in 2006River Walk has always been upheld as a prototype for using native plants to reclaim dramatically altered banks of the Housatonic, and our success is clear to the naked eye. But we are now going a step further by measuring and monitoring our planting efforts. This will provide us with hard data with which to report and assess our progress. These results will also help guide our decisions about future planting schemes.
The 2006 growing season was the beginning of our plant monitoring program. We started by setting up experimental plots near the River Garden, in the south section. With the help of the Marconica crew and Simon’s Rock interns, we pulled plants and rototilled the soil in a roughly 6m by 4m flat, partially shaded area that had not yet been worked by planting crews. Within this area we sectioned off eight 0.5m by 0.5m “quadrats.” In each quadrat, we planted one of each of the following native, perennial species: Viburnum acerifolium (maple-leaved viburnum), Helianthus decapetalus (thin-leaved sunflower), Lindera benzoin (spicebush), Agrimony striata (woodland agrimony). Four of the quadrats (randomly assigned) are receiving “compost tea” treatments, while 4 remain controls.
On each plant, we measured plant height, number of leaves, number of flowers/buds, and number of side branches. In October, we collected the herbaceous plants (Helianthus and Agrimony) from the base of the stem to dry them and weigh them. We have also tallied the numbers of weeds and weighed them. All of these data points will be used to compare treatment and control plots, thereby quantifying the effects of the compost tea. These data will also shed light on which species are most successful at River Walk, which in turn will be the species we propagate and plant most frequently.
