Hindu Yuva SEWA Project: Yesler Creek Restoration
Project Goals: The Yesler Creek ravine headwaters is a small creek that runs along the Burke Gilman bicycle trail in Seattle. Even in such an urban environment, it serves as a thriving habitat of native plants and animals. However, the ecological balance had been disturbed by unchecked growth of the Himalayan berry plant, that took over the entire creek. This project is part of a multi-year effort to remove invasive species like the Himalayan berry and to install a diverse suite of native plants, one section of the ravine at a time.
What we did: We worked with the UW Restoration Ecology Network team, that has a group of volunteers who work on this project every month. The volunteers first taught us about how to take a potted plant and plant it to grow in the wild. We spent about 2 hours doing this, having a lot of fun with gardening tools. The next part of the project was to use bioengineering techniques to prevent soil erosion on another side of the ravine, where there were not a lot of plants to bind the soil. This was fairly hard work: We had to move heavy logs of wood to create a check so that rainwater flowing down the slope flows around the check rather than straight down. We then planted fast-growing trees around the check so that their roots would go in and bind the soil well, preventing further erosion in the longer term (even after the check we build decayed/was destroyed). Overall, everyone had a lot of fun working with our hands in the mud, and we learned a lot about gardening techniques.
