New Brighton 2024 Year End Reflection

New Brighton 2024 Year End Reflection

Report by Nigel Peck.

With the arrival of 2025 and the approach of our fourth year of the New Brighton project, it seems a good time to reflect back on what we’ve achieved in the last year and look forward to the possibilities of this year.

Reflecting back:

Invasives:

What stood out last year was massive invasive plant pulling efforts involving armload after armload of purple vetch, white-sweet clover and finally, scotch broom. The purple vetch was first and almost did not seem worth pulling until we found it engulfing all the planted perennials – not only the flowers but also the shrubs. So starting in early May we spent a month pulling vetch to clear the native perennials and as much of the hillock as possible in the process creating massive piles each week.

This was followed by white-sweet clover which was most thick on the Port strip.  Having experienced it take over the ‘Strip’ in 2023, we focussed on it immediately and got it cleared before it took over a second time.

Most daunting though was scotch broom which started shooting up in late August everywhere. One week you would not see much – only to return the next week to see hundreds of shoots in a two or three metre radius. Every work party day we would fan out and each person would pull hundreds of shoots ranging from 15cm high to waist height. The small shoots were of course easy to pull but anything over about 60 cm in height was a real concentrated effort to pull by hand and over 75cm required assistance supplied by several different homemade ‘Extractigators’, designed separately by Nigel & Tim Shannon.

The fact we pulled thousands and thousands of invasive plants, particularly scotch broom is a testament to the effectiveness, dedication and perseverance of the New Brighton volunteers.

Himalayan blackberry was of course also a focus of attention with several months of clipping pulling and hauling in January and February. We cleared most of the shoreline blackberry cane and left it until the fall after the bird nesting season. Another intimidating invasive was bull thistle which required constant attention through the year. It was nothing like the hundreds and hundreds of bull thistle pulled and clipped in our first year of the project.

Watering:

We did quite well last year starting in late May by taking extra effort to clear around transplants so we could see the transplanted perennials that needed to be watered. This work set us up for effective watering with the summer dryness and heat waves starting early July.

We found that with only 8 New Brighton volunteers we could empty the cistern and water, by hand, upwards of 1500 plants in less than two hours. The system involved emptying from the cistern to small sized wheeled garbage cans which were wheeled to different watering areas, transferring water to 5 gallon pails and then watering either by yoghurt container for the flowers or 2 litre pails for the shrubs. This is quite impressive given that the water cistern provided by the Vancouver Park Board holds 1250 litres (330 gal)!

The Vancouver Park Board had the cistern refilled bi-weekly so the challenges were to set volunteer watering dates that emptied the cistern before each refill and to try to water all the transplants. Watering continued through to September at which point combatting the exponentially increasing amount of scotch broom shoot growth took priority. We did a great job!

Planting:

This year the Vancouver Park Board was again very generous in its allocation of native perennial flowers and shrubs for the New Brighton diversity enhancement project with the delivery of about 1000 flowers on October 10th. It is both gratifying and daunting to receive so many plants.

They sat for a while as we again focussed on clearing around transplants already in the ground from previous years so we would not trample or inadvertently dig them out while putting in the new transplants.

Planting proper started October 26th and continued through to December 1st on nine separate work dates with 72 people volunteering a total of 132 work days. We were delighted to have Templeton High School students join us for a second year of planting and by a serendipitous chance ended up having a large contingent of BCIT Architecture Science students help out on the first two days of planting.

It was an awesome endeavour which planted all but 65 plants which are patiently sitting at the park under a protective layer of shredded leaves for their moment to establish themselves on the hillock.

Looking forward:

Twenty twenty five really is quite simple. We’ll just:

January – MarchInvasive removal
* Clip & dig shoreline blackberry * Clip & dig other invasives
April – MayContinued invasive removal including
* Pulling purple vetch!* Pulling sweet-white clover
May – JuneClearing around native perennial transplants for summer watering
July – SeptemberWatering every couple weeks
       & if possible
Continued blackberry clipping through summer!
August – OctoberScotch broom pulling !*!
October – November2025 native perennial planting?

Let’s see how it unfolds,…

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