Krista Jones

While walking your dog, be careful where you let them pee. Dog urine is a detriment to our lovely urban trees. Dog urine severely harms the base of trees. When a dog pees on a tree, the chemicals from their urine soak into the bark. They then reach the cambium (the tree tissue layer, tasked with sending nutrients throughout the tree). This layer is then damaged, destroying the tree or impacting its growth.

In fact, it’s important to keep your dog away from the base of trees as well. When a dog pees on the soil around the tree, it can create a salty crust, which inhibits water absorption. During these hot summer days, it is as important as ever to make sure our trees are getting enough water. 

For more information on the topic, read: Why You Shouldn’t Let Your Dog Pee On Trees

As the weather warms up and the flowers begin to bloom, it’s important that we look out and care for our trees. Here are some quick tips to help your trees thrive this summer!

1. TREE ASSESSMENT: Without leaves, it’s easier to see if your tree has any damage. Make sure to check for broken or hanging branches, cracks or dead limbs in the tree. If you do notice any tree damage, make sure to contact a qualified tree arborist at https://www.cwarboristassociation.ca/
2. MULCHING: The best and easiest way to take care of your tree is to mulch. Mulch provides nutrients and moisture to the surrounding soil, helping your tree stay healthy and hydrated. When mulching, make sure to make a ring of mulch around the tree, keeping the mulch away from the base of the tree (like a donut, not a volcano). The tree bark can rot away if the mulch is against the bark, leading to the tree’s eventual failure.
3. WATERING: Making sure your tree is hydrated is very important – especially as we move into the warmer and dryer summer months. If you have a young tree, watering is crucial, as their roots aren’t as deep in the ground, and will have a harder time finding wet soil. To combat this, once a week place your hose at the base of the tree and put it on a slow trickle of water for 10-20 minutes.
4. BLUE RIBBONS: Many in the community have tied a blue ribbon around a tree, in support of the #saveourwater campaign. This is fantastic! But please make sure that the ribbon is tied loosely around the tree. Tightly tied ribbons will trap moisture against the bark and cause damage.

With these tips, your trees will be thriving! Hope you all have a fun and safe summer!

Come volunteer with our tree inventory group!

You’ve seen cheery volunteers in their yellow T shirts for more than 10 years now. It’s a great way to learn about trees, work with really nice folks and help add the knowledge about the trees in our community.  A training workshop will be offered in the week of July 13th. You will learn to ID our most common trees, how to measure them, and how to assess their health.  We ask you to commit 2 hours/week for 8 weeks at a time that suits you, over July and August. If you have a conflict, subs can cover for you. To find out more, please get in touch at neighbourwoods@eloraenvironmentcentre.ca or by calling Toni Ellis at 519-362-9469.

Currently, community engagement around Climate Change isn’t working. In the spring of 2017, the ECEE will be hosting a Summit: Rebooting Climate Change using a Toolkit of messages and stories generated by an innovative, multi-discipline Think Tank being held in Elora in November.

Our newest volunteer program is about to get underway. The volunteers have been trained by arborist Chris Morrison this past week and are ready to hit the street of Fergus and Elora and prune some trees!

Many of you will be familiar with our Tree Inventory program, but this year we decided to turn things up a notch and introduce a pilot project – which has only been organized once before in Thunder Bay: Citizen Pruners.

The goal of Citizen Pruners is to educate a group of volunteers on how to properly prune and maintain a tree. Over the years, NeighbourWoods has planted many trees in our community, but tree care does not stop there. It is extremely important to prune young trees – before small problems grow into bigger problems; and want our trees to last as long as possible in our urban environment. So, that means pruning is a necessity!

Our group of volunteers spent two nights last week learning about tree anatomy and proper pruning technique with arborist Chris Morrison; and with one more field-training night, the eve of pruning is upon us!

So, throughout the months of June and July, a team of 20 volunteers and 4 arborists will be going around Fergus and Elora, wearing orange t-shirts and pruning the young trees – which will help support their healthy growth in the future.

Make sure to stay tuned for more news about our Citizen Pruners Team!

Centre Wellington now has a Public Forest Policy which is a comprehensive document that outlines standards for tree planting and maintenance on municipal and private property.

If you want to learn more about this legislation you can read the document, published January 1st of this year.  To access the document click here.

Korea is a mysterious country. Once one of the poorest countries in the 1960s it has achieved an economic miracle, now chasing Canada as the 11^th largest economy. Among some uplifting stories that I heard from my parents, my favourite is the Gold Collection movement that saved the country out of the Asian economic crisis in 1997. My mother donated her wedding ring and golden charms – a common gift for the one-year celebration of the baby’s birth – to the government while my father took a salary cut to help his company to stay competitive in the exports scene. I would not have had the privilege to grow up in Canada without the personal sacrifice that my parents generation made for the country.

Our nature is also on the brink of collapse, but we have not discovered the way to convince people to share such burden. Dumping more scientific facts and jargons have only frustrated people while the doom-and-gloom scenarios have turned people away from the conversation. Now, the climate change is called with various nicknames such as a hoax, cult, religion or conspiracy. Expressing love for the environment is for the hippies. You could easily avoid the unwanted conversation with the magic word called the environment.

What would be the solution to our pressing issues against the climate change? Could optimistic messages work since negative messages have been ineffective? Don’t we turn ourselves to optimistic stories because we are surrounded by negative news all the time? What about financial incentive because money matters to all of us? How about using marketing techniques and social media? Social marketing has been very effective in reducing alcohol consumption and eliminating drug use. What about the community-level grassroots approach? Farmers markets had a decade of explosive growth. To my surprise, all of these approaches have been experimented in the realm of climate change and proven to be rather unsuccessful.

It seems like we are running out of options. Then, what could be our next move? Nobody knows the clear answer for this question, but we could certainly learn something from the Gold Collection Movement. Neither the government nor organization was able to save the country. It was the power of ordinary people who were willing to make the sacrifice and share the burden that helped save the nation from the verge of bankruptcy. Perhaps, we are waiting for the simple nudge to start the environmental miracle.

Maybe this is the decade you join Neighbourwoods!  Annual membership is just $20 and demonstrates  your support for our urban forest.

Join at the next Tree Talk or email Rob Guthrie (rwfromcw@gmail.com)