A Good Morning’s Work: 1400 Trees Planted

Forest

Our Forest Fund’s March 11 tree planting was a great success! 24 volunteers, including 12 students from the National Honor Society of Kingston High School earning community service points, planted 1400 trees in the Port Gamble Forest Heritage Park.

After meeting up at 9am at the orange gate on the Port Gamble-Suquamish Road, volunteers walked about a mile into the park, past both clearcuts and overstocked Douglas fir plantation tracts. Kitsap County Parks has begun ecologically thinning the overstocked sections in the 756 acres acquired in the 2022 tree campaign. You can see the thinnings and the thinned forest behind the students here:

National Honor Society students from Kingston High School with their teacher Ivonne Heapy in front of ecologically thinned forest
National Honor Society students from Kingston High School with their teacher Ivonne Heapy in front of ecologically thinned forest in the PGFHP.

It is in these newly thinned acres that last Saturday’s volunteers planted western white pines, hemlocks, red cedars and spruces, after a tree planting lesson by Arno Bergstrom, Kitsap County Parks Forester.  The rain held off until noon, and by then all the available saplings were in the ground spread over 12 acres.  Coffee, doughnuts and hot spiced cider fueled and rewarded the gang, but the real rewards of a healthy, varied forest will be reaped for generations to come.

Many thanks to: Cora, Charlie, Edie, Duane, Octavio, Janice, Ivonne, Biyanca, Ben, Noah, Ian, Allison, Andray, Don, Jeff, Adia, Quinn, Jacob, Chuck, David, Mark, Tyler, Isaiah, Bill and Arno!

Well done, everyone!

Volunteer extraordinaire Chuck Holland recorded some of the action here: