| <div class="ck-content"><p>A half dozen volunteers turned out on Saturday to take the next step in the restoration of a healthy native-species ecosystem at Brumley South. </p><p>We'd previously found a whole lot of fence sections and metal poles from previous efforts that weren't being used. We decided to see if we could repurpose them for our fencing plans.</p><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1MmzDs3BBVOKqjmzPgGENlOi0nWp5xxsq" alt="Chunks of fencing to be re-purposed" width="600" height="400">
</div><p>They worked great! Each section was folded and zip-tied. We figured that they were designed to be pulled apart and dropped over a single sapling. Well, that wasn't what <i>we</i> were going to do. So we snipped those connectors, flattened the fencing and then started to connect them with other sections by “threading" the metal poles through the edges of two sections.</p><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1eBkzxDRj7SwRAik-gCU9VnNtm8UQh-Qx" alt="Assembling a fence" width="600" height="400"></div><p>After two hours, we'd finished one big area that contains dozens of white oak babies, plus many hackberry, box elder and others. And another smaller area that had a high concentration of hackberries, many of them already a foot tall. Seems like deer don't graze on those, which is great. We plan to fence off a few other areas nearby - I'd like to do one along Walnut Grove Loop so that lots of visitors can see it and hopefully be inspired to get involved. Also need to work on signage to educate folks on what we are doing.</p><p>Here's a great shot of our volunteers inside the big area, after they cleared out pretty much every bit of privet and stilt grass and olive they could lay hands on. I was especially pleased that we could do this without buying <i>new</i> stuff, that just means more of our planet getting consumed. Overall, a very good day for the planet!</p><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1LOMDVEipykInAIyp5n1Dqz7GSqD-DiHL" alt="Celebrating a fenced in area" width="600" height="400"></div></div> |