ReLeaf recently planted 50 trees at McDowell Park and another 38 at an adjacent school yard.
Funded through grants, ReLeaf hopes to plant 2,000 trees throughout Petaluma.
small solutions, planting trees—that kind of thing can actually have a big impact through time.” Heckman did an analysis of carbon sequestration—the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide—on his own household garden and was surprised by the results. “Our garden is maybe 2,000 square feet, has quite a few trees and food,” he says. “It has rainwater catchment, gray water and chickens, and it’s growing food and habitat. Right now, there’s six different types of citrus out there, and there’s still apples on our tree, and the garlic is growing and the onions.” Heckman found that the garden sequesters two tons of carbon, which is the same amount of carbon that can be sequestered by 20 mature oak trees. “Trees are hugely important, but you can’t fit 20 mature oak trees on a little lot,” he says. “Yet our little lot is sequestering the same amount of carbon.” Across the street is a 3,000-square-foot garden at the Cavanagh Recreation Center at 426 Eighth St. It has two rainwater catchment systems and provides food, medicine and native habitat. It sequesters one ton of carbon a year. “So that’s two gardens with hundreds of types of food and medicinal plants and seven rainwater catchment systems and they’re sequestering three tons of carbon a year,” Heckman says. “You’re producing oxygen, cleaning the air, creating food, creating habitat and getting the mental and physical health benefits from being in nature,” Heckman says. “There’s a lot of documented physical, mental and emotional health benefits of being in nature, but we could be growing more nature in our neighborhoods, in our households, too.” Heckman says visiting parks is great, but not enough. “I love going in the mountains and going to Helen Putnam [Regional] Park and those sorts of things,” he says. “But we have to rewild our neighborhoods too.” Daily Acts has many opportunities available that locals can participate in like an upcoming program offering free landscape assessments and a mid-March Native Tree Care Workshop.
Restoring nature, restoring health Another local organization that helps locals care for their properties and encourages native plants and trees is the Sonoma Ecology Center near Glen Ellen. The ecology center does a lot of restoration work on both public and private lands. Lauren Claussen is the restoration program manager at SEC and she says their projects are setting up the region for long-term sustainability with climate and wildfire resilience. “We’re doing really important work to enhance and improve ecological processes in the region,” Claussen says. “But equally important, we focus on educating and connecting with the public—whether that’s private landowners, collaborations with Sonoma County entities, city entities and different people or organizations like that.” Claussen says they’re doing a lot of work to restore forests and streams impacted by wildfires and erosion. “We’re also doing a ton of vegetation management, which as we all know from the many years of fires it’s really important to be managing forests sustainably and encouraging long-term forest health,” she says. They promote planting native plants, grasses, herbs, shrubs and trees in both wildland and urban areas. One way they encourage local plants and trees is by collecting acorns or seeds and growing them in their native plant nursery down at the Sonoma Garden Park, at 19996 Seventh St. in Sonoma. “We try to collect the material from the region and then replant it back into those areas.” There are many reasons why an area might need restoration. “It could be that a fire has gone through and taken out or scorched all the native trees,” Claussen says. “Maybe only bays are growing now, and we want to bring that area back into balance, where it’s not just a highly flammable bay forest. So we’ll do some thinning and things like that.” Claussen says that with the changing climate the stronger storms and atmospheric rivers can cause serious erosion. “We try to come from an ecological and minimal-input approach to reducing erosion through doing plantings of native plants,” she says. “Native grasses can help stabilize the soil over the long term.”
42 NorthBaybiz
February 2024
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