Connectivity Matters - Namebine-Giizis (Sucker Moon) - 5 May 2023

Happy Namebine-Giizis (Sucker Moon). This month the forest was alive with the songs of spring peepers. In some parts of Turtle Island, last month’s full moon is known as Frog Moon. Here’s the story of Frog Moon from the book Thirteen Moons On Turtle’s Back.

Happenings

Yesterday we held a very last minute planting of 200+ seedlings at the HWY 15 Indigenous Food Sovereignty Garden in the area prepped for the 300m2 Little Forest planned for fall 2023. Seedlings had been overwintered from the 2022 fall restoration work planned for Belle Island as part of Enji-Goode - Place of Balance Protocol in collaboration with the Belle Island Caretakers Circle and Kingston Indigenous Languages Nest. We’ve had to postpone Belle Island Restoration work until the fall or spring 2024.

We also planted 30 Butternuts outside of the Little Forest as Butternuts need sun to thrive. Overtime we’ll underplant with Pawpaws and Savanna species The Butternuts were grown from seeds collected from healthy, genetically tested pure Butternut trees in Eastern Ontario that we received from the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority’s Butternut Recovery Program.

We didn’t quite finish, so if you have time to help plant the remaining seedlings & Butternuts email Maureen ([email protected]) or Josh ([email protected]).

Imagining the Forest at the Stewart School in Perth: In April Joanne, Nathan and Sylvie from the K-12 node visited Stewart School in Perth. 50+ kids in grades 2-4 learned about 16 different species of trees and how they like to live together in community with each other and with other beings (here they are adding roots to the mural). View the full photo album (including videos) here. Unfortunately I forgot to take a video of the kids collecting imagining themselves as trees within the forest! K-12 node will be writing this up as a lesson plan schools can use as the first step in preparing the plant a Little Forest at the school.

Health & Safety Plan: Chloe & the Forest Wranglers node drafted an amazing Health & Safety plan for the Senior’s Centre Little Forest project. This will also serve as a template for future plantings. Later in May we’re hoping to prepare the forest floor at the Senior’s Centre and at KFHC sites. We’ll send out an email once we know the dates for the workbees.

Connectivity matters

Often you’ll hear that only large forest patches matter for conserving biodiversity. However, small forest patches linked together via habitat corridors are much more important than previously thought for for protecting and growing plant biodiversity. This 18 year study showed an annual increase in the number of plant species within small, restored patches of savanna over time when connected by habitat corridors.

Join a Jane's Walk this weekend. Walks are happening Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Walks include:

• The Bird's History of Humans in Kingston

• Belle Park

• Lemoine Point Farm from the other side of the fence

Rewilding microbial communities: a roadmap for urban ecosystem health. May 25, 7:00 pm. I000 Islands Master Gardeners are hosting ecologist and author Dr. Jake Robinson in a talk about Invisible Friends - the microbes that live in the soil, on plants, in the air, and within our bodies - and the importance of restoring biodiversity in our cities. Register on Eventbrite.

The Northern Forest Atlas is an amazing resource with charts, digital atlases, posters, quick guides and courses. We’re going to look into printing a few of the charts and posters to use in workshops and at our booth.

Want to learn to identify the different shrubs and trees in our little forests? Check out their digital atlas of woody plants of the northern forest - a collection of 1,600 high resolution images, with descriptions, diagnoses, and ecological information for 258 species.

Speaking on behalf of the natural world

Moral imagining: “collective imagining to increase radical kinship with the human and more-than-human worlds, present, past and future.”

Turns out Joanne is a trailblazer. Last year she helped youth at Pathways to Education imagine their neighbourhood from the perspective of the more-than-human beings with whom they share the neighbourhood.

Last week, Moral Imaginations facilitated something similar as they held the (River) Roding Interspecies Council working with @PolicyLabUK, policy makers, government, local organisations & residents gathered to explore more-than-human voices in policy making.

“The #InterspeciesCouncil is a participatory, semi-improvisational roleplay guided by facts and issues, and brought alive by intuition, imagination and sensing. It’s part of a lineage of work of #JoannaMacy, and has been developed with her input and the help of many others.”

Cascadia Field Guide also offers resources for roleplaying some of the beings that live in Cascadia.