Bede’s Bog Pics

This past Saturday a small of group of Bede’s folk began our work on the swath of land in the Palo Alto Baylands that our parish has committed to adopting. We hope to rehabilitate this small piece of land and thereby enable it to host a wide array of animals and plants and to help clean water from the Bay as well as rain-water run-off from the Peninsula.

For now, we are pulling weeds–mostly mustard (ironically enough)–and in November, when the rainy season begins, we will start planting other, more helpful plants. The ranger who set this up said that without us this swath of land would go mostly untended and become a field of mustard sucking up all the water from the soil, thus drying it out and rendering it unable to soak up and clean rain, run-off and Bay water. The tall, dry mustard stalks (seen here in some of these pictures) also make this plot of land uninhabitable for local birds and other wildlife, not to mention other plants (such as the beneficent green pickle-weed which one can actually eat–and one of us did!), which do not rob the soil of all its moisture and provide food and nesting material for birds and other critters.

So here we are, hard at work pulling up weeds.