Backyard Stewardship - You Don’t Have to Do it Alone!
If island landowners want a comprehensive understanding of their forested property, there’s no better source than the Coached Stewardship course offered by Washington State University’s Forest Extension Service each year. This online series of evening classes plus site visits have a minimal fee but pays real rewards in increased understanding of what’s on, around, and under the landscape you own.
(This winter’s course is sold out, but look for future offerings, maybe as early as next spring.)
Over several weeks of this course, you’ll learn everything from the health of your property’s plant life to the type and quality of soil underfoot. (If it’s Vashon, that soil can be . . . a challenge on many fronts.) You’ll learn how to measure trees, inventory shrubs, and forbs, study the role rain plays on your property, and discover how your place fits into the larger ecosystem and watershed surrounding it. (You’ll also learn what terms like “watershed” mean.) You’ll assess, more than you ever thought you could, the number and types of wildlife that share the landscape with you. Nothing feels better than developing “fresh eyes” to see a place you thought was so familiar.
Or maybe something is, in fact, better: As part of the course, instructors will visit your property and offer still another set of fresh eyes looking at your place. They won’t be intrusive or scoldy when they come. They’ll just offer friendly advice on bringing your property more in line with the hopes you have for it.
You’ve given a lot to have your little (or big) spot on Vashon; if you give a little more to steward its natural resources, it will pay you back in spades.
Some author—Henry David Thoreau, the American essayist, and naturalist?—said that everything a person needs to know lies within a few miles of where that person lives. Seems pretty extreme, but the idea has value. Maybe if we paid more attention to the intensely local, we’d experience just a bit more contentment in our lives. How great would it feel to shed our inherited role as restless Americans grazing everywhere for happiness, leaving the landscape where we’ve been that much worse for the wear, and instead staying put a bit and making that landscape better?
