2023 Little Forests are planted! Bbinaakwe-giizis (Leaves Falling Moon) - 28 October 2023

Happy binaakwe-giizis (falling leaves moon)!

“Falling Leaves Moon is when we gift others with what we have gathered. We are respectful in our giving, knowing the honour it brings. During this moon, we look inward and understand the journey of letting go of what we no longer need to carry.” Ontario Native Women’s Association 

2023 Little Forests are planted!

Ellie Michelutti and Shanzeh Farooq, Grade 7 students at Calvin Park Public School in Kingston, helped plant trees at the Seniors Centre. Photo: Meghan Balogh /The Whig-Standard.  

Fabulous article in the Kingston Whig-Standard about the three Little Forests we planted at the Senior’s Centre on Francis Street. The Little Forests are:

• Great Lakes Mixed Forest

• Carolinian Walking Forest (assisted migration)

• Bird Forest (a hedgerow)

Wonderful video and drone footage by Mike Hill (@aerosnapper) and Paul Carl capturing the planting of 347 trees by King's Town students, supplementing the trees and shrubs planted in the spring to finish a 264m2 Little Forest.

And a picture from last week’s phase one planting of the Grenville Park Little Forest. With Susie leading the charge, members of the community  planted 390 trees (some propagated by Susie) and 136 ferns (all propagated by Susie) over several days with the help of two classes from Milles-îles high school and a 4/5 class from Madeleine-de-Roybon elementary school. All in all, it was a tremendous success, the students learned a lot, and it bodes well for next year's larger Phase 2 planting! Susie’s goal? A total of 3000 trees and shrubs!

Prepping the forest floor for 2024

We’ll be planting Little Forests at three KFHC (Kingston Frontenac Housing Corporation) sites in 2024. This week Nathan spearheaded preparation of the forest floor for one of the sites (the first time we’re preparing the forest floor a year in advance!)

Grade 7 LEAP and Challenge students from Calvin Park PS, Nursing placement students from St Lawrence College and community volunteers came out to help, covering approximately 330 square meters with compost and arborist woodchips.

The story of a vole

Discretion is their only defense against ending up in the talons of a hawk or owl. But they’re out there, sometimes in huge numbers, and the natural world we’re familiar with is largely the result of the ceaseless workings of thousands of these humble animals.

Matt Pelikan, Meadow voles are mighty in ecological terms

When ordering our tree plugs there’s a minimum order of 25, which means we end up with surplus trees. We use the surplus for Pocket Forests or overwinter for next year’s planting. This year, after sorting the seedlings, we packed up the extras into buckets and boxes like the one above.  

When Chloe went to unpack the boxes, which sat for only a week, she discovered a vole nest in a bucket in one of the boxes (can you spot the vole in this picture?)

The vole munched on roots.

Eating some completely off and snipping off the stems from others.

Voles are the reason we wait to wrap the trees until after several hard frosts (here are Jim’s grandkids protecting the seedlings at the Lakeside Little Forest in December 2021). By that time voles are settled in their winter homes and our trees are mostly safe from voles who would otherwise decide the tree tubes might make a cosy winter home.

While we have to protect the little trees from voles, after our run in with the vole who ate a few of our trees I did some googling and learned just how important voles are for our ecosystem.  

The good

Voles are hugely important for our ecosystem:

• helping with decomposition and nutrient release by consuming large quantities of plant material

• fertilizing vegetation by dispersing their nutrient rich fecal pellets over a wide area

• influencing the survival and growth rates of trees by dispersing mycorrhizal fungi

• dispersing seeds of some native plants through their fecal pellets

• influencing the rate and direction of succession from meadow to forest

• serving as staples in the diet of many predators including hawks, owls, ravens, herons, snakes, fisher, raccoons, foxes coyotes, opossums and even big frogs (as a result their average lifespan is only about a month)

The bad

When you compare the good with the bad, the good definitely outweighs the bad… and we can take precautions to avoid the bad:

• eating tree bark in winter (girdling the trees, eating all the tree roots, severing the trunk)

• building nests in buckets of our little seedlings!

Some interesting advice

In addition to wrapping trees Larry Hodgson, suggests:

“The most important thing is to avoid cleaning up flower and vegetable beds in the fall (it’s best to do any cleaning in the spring, when the voles can find an abundance of foods other than your plants). By eliminating their primary food source in the fall, you are pushing them straight to the only food left: trees and shrubs, grass roots, bulbs, perennial crowns, etc… During winter, get in the habit of walking all around fragile trees. This will pack down the snow, forming a barrier of hardened snow that voles will not be able to cross.” 

Upcoming Kingston events

Song for autumn by Mary Oliver

Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now how comfortable it will be to touch the earth instead of the nothingness of the air and the endless freshets of wind? And don’t you think the trees, especially those with mossy hollows, are beginning to look for

the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep inside their bodies? And don’t you hear the goldenrod whispering goodbye, the everlasting being crowned with the first tuffets of snow? The pond stiffens and the white field over which the fox runs so quickly brings outits long blue shadows. The wind wags its many tails. And in the evening the piled firewood shifts a little, longing to be on its way.