Dear Neighbors,

I am thrilled to announce that Glee Ingram, the Greenbelt Guardians, and BHNA have won the Neighborhood Association of the Year award for outstanding contributions to the City of Austin and the Parks and Recreation Department in 2005-2006. Glee will be honored at the 9th Annual Adopt-A-Park Awards Luncheon at Fiesta Gardens Pavilion on Friday, October 27.

The Adopt-A-Park program is a joint initiative of PARD and the Austin Parks Foundation. The program works to increase community and business awareness and support for the parks throughout Austin. Please join me in congratulating Glee and all of the dedicated Greenbelt Guardians who have worked many days along the creek and greatly deserve this recognition.

Debby Kalk
President, BHNA

Homedale Trail, 2010 Homedale Drive (view map)

I'm hoping this cool fall weather inspires lots of volunteers to come out to work on our greenbelt. It had a long, hot, dry summer and needs some tender loving care. Only the weeds seemed to prosper.

Our primary work will be on the Homedale Trail at 2010 Homedale: weeding, trimming, pruning, gathering seeds (there are lots of them -nature wanted to assure future generations), raking rocks off the trail and into drain channels, removing stumps, creating windrows on the steep slopes with dry and fallen limbs, gathering more stones for future edging and retaining wall work, and trash gathering.

As always, we will also be removing our targeted invader plants: ligustrum and nandina. The seed bank is still at work, and there is some new small growth in areas we had already cleared. Repeat, repeat, this is a commitment that takes persistence. The January "rapid response" herbicide treatment of large ligustrum trees has resulted in some large open canopy space on the trail hillside. Many native seeds stored in the soil are responding to the new sun exposure, producing new shrub and tree growth. We will also help fill in the area with seeds that we collect on site.

We will also have a team of wall builders at the Gus Fruh trail site, to continue the work on the creek side retaining wall. We have refined the design to include large boulder steppers down into the creek/pool. If you would like to work on the wall, please call Stan Ostrum at 431-4501 and rsvp here.

We will be working with Halloween spirit, some treats and silliness. Please come join the fun and good work. We need to know how many are coming so we can feed you lunch and plan appropriately for tools and supplies. RSVP to:

Glee Ingram
gleeful@earthlink.net
Greenbelt Coordinator