A soggy – but successful – service day

THANK YOU for all our LM Serves volunteers did this weekend to serve our community! The weather was not on our side in the end, but many were willing to brave the elements and pull bags and bags of invasive plants, trash, and recyclables from our parks!

(And for those that could not participate in the rain – we know they will take that willingness to serve and the knowledge they’ve gained out into the world on a drier day!)

“THANK you for volunteering to come to Sligo Creek Park on such an overcast and rainy day to help us remove wavyleaf basket grass for our Park.  All of you had to learn how to recognize the plant amounts all the Japanese stilt grass that is growing in the Park.  All adjusted to this task.  We collected 10 bags of material which included some trash we found.” – Jim Anderson, Friends of Sligo Creek

You can see more photos of our soggy service day on Facebook here.

We connected to our projects this weekend through Rock Creek Conservancy, Friends of Sligo Creek, and Montgomery Parks Weed Warriors. You can learn more about each and sign up to get more involved by following the links. Many other organizations are working to protect and restore Montgomery County’s natural environment – check out our growing list here or search our volunteer database for opportunities tagged “environment.”

Unfortunately, the stream clean up portion of our day at Matthew Henson State Park and Turkey Branch Creek was impacted by a watermain break nearby and many volunteers had questions about the color of the water. Henry Coppola, Stream & Park Cleanup Coordinator, Montgomery Parks said, “The crazy color is mostly from the clay / soils around the pipe where they burst; water main breaks put a lot of extra water volume and sediment into the creeks and it’s important for us to know about them so that we can work with WSSC to have them do some remediation and cleanup work.”

Thank you again to all of our volunteers and a special thank you to site leaders, Michelle, Jim, and Tania and Team Captains Kelly, Theresa, Kaarmin, and Dana!

Stay tuned for information about our autumn LM Serves Day to be announced soon!