Buckthorn Volunteers Needed!
Here is your chance to “get close to nature” and help the environment. We need volunteers to help control European Buckthorn, an invasive shrub, in Rockville County Park and Nature Preserve. This county park is immediately west of the City of Rockville’s Eagle Park.
WHEN: Each Sunday afternoon in October from 2 to 4 p.m.
WHERE: We’ll meet at the steel shed on the corner of Sauk River Road and Glacier Road. This is 1/3 mile west of the County Highway 139 bridge over the Sauk River, just north of Rockville. Cross the bridge, then stay left, on Sauk River Road, after Hwy 139 turns right.
WHAT TO BRING: Sturdy clothes, gloves and shoes suitable for brushy conditions. Loppers or pruning saws may be helpful. We’ll have extra saws and gloves, and we’ll provide herbicide for painting stumps.
MORE INFO: We’ll continue efforts started last fall to control this nasty shrub. We’ll work in small groups. Some groups will revisit areas worked on last year to pull up new young plants. Other groups will “push back the frontier” of bigger buckthorn. We want to get them before they are mature enough to have their black berries – which can be spread by birds.
October is a good time to control buckthorn. It is easier to identify then because it still has green leaves, whereas most other plants have dropped their leaves. Also the various “bugs” are mostly gone, and the stinging nettle has mostly died back.
For further information contact John or Linda Peck at 685-3365 or Stearns County Parks at 255-6172.