Restoration Planting Day
January 4, 2020
9:30-12:00

Come help us replace ugly weeds with wildlife-friendly native plants! We'll be planting plugs (seedlings) of three native species selected for their ability to hold a creek bank together at a prominent site on Broadway in downtown Walnut Creek. For more details and to sign up, click here.

Creek Restoration Workdays

After we have spent the summer removing arundo, we spend the winter planting appropriate native creek plants in its place.

Join us for some rewarding work, camaraderie, and usually a brief talk about an aspect of creek ecology. No experience is required -- just a desire to make the creek a better place for both humans and wildlife.

For more information about workdays
To sign up, contact us.
Photos of past restoration days

********************************************

Upcoming Events

Next Restoration event: Sat Jan 4, 9:30am -see above
More restoration: Jan Feb Mar - dates TBD
Annual Creek Cleanup: Sat May 9, 2020, 8:45am

To sign up for an event, contact us.

********************************************

The Second Year of Arundo

As members of the Walnut Creek Watershed Council, we joined the watershed-wide focus on arundo in 2018. Arundo (a relative of bamboo) is the single worst weed in California creeks, and we have a lot of it in certain areas of our watershed. We are taking a three-pronged approach:

mapping all the arundo in our watershed
educating the public, especially landowners along creeks, about arundo and why they should remove it
continuing to remove arundo ourselves and restoring the creek with native plants that will stabilize the banks and be beneficial to wildlife

In 2019 we have led four arundo removal events and established a relationship with landowners on Pine Creek. In February 2020 we hope to invite people to a restoration workshop because many landowners are willing to do it themselves once they know how.

Friends of the Creeks participated in filming a video about arundo which you can see here.

Other Activities

Annual Creek Cleanup

In May we held the 30th Annual Downtown Creek Cleanup. While the volune was about the same as other recent years, there was a lot more trash and much less vegetation. However, there were almost no plastic bags and little fast food trash, so our local ordinances banning them are effective.

Community Service Day (October)

We had three projects for CSD: Arundo removal in Civic Park, a cleanup on Pine Creek, and a new idea -- a family creek cleanup in Heather Farm Park centered on kids age 6-10.

Family Creek Cleanup (November)

The Heather Farm family creek cleanup was such a success that we did another one on Pine Creek with a group of parents and kids age 5-8 from Parkmead School.

Planting plugs from a tray

Cutting arundo on Community Serviee Day in October

Cutting and painting arundo during the removal process - June

two guys cutting arundo

Volunteers removing a large stand of arundo in Civic Park in April.

3 shopping carts, a baby stroller, and miscellaneous trash

Shopping carts were a very popular item at the 2019 cleanup. Crew 7 collected three of them plus a baby stroller.

Parkmead kids cleanup on Pine Creek. They were very thorough and picked up every bit of trash we saw.