With Naturalist Stewart Wechsler:

Wednesday, December 14th 8:30 am–11:00 am, Stewart’s Stewardship Adventures offers: Artful, Therapeutic and Informed Weeding:

Help preserve our natural heritage for future generations. Learn the best strategies to help declining local, wild rarities grow back, as we protect them from weeds. The wealth of our ancient, unique, local natural community, has been in decline ever since the first global gold seekers brought with them seeds of weeds that our local natural community was not adapted to living with. Tinkering with plants as we sit in beautiful natural surroundings, goes back in our evolutionary roots to before agriculture, and there is an instinctive therapy in sitting on a bed of moss, plucking out plants, either for harvest, or to help valued surrounding plants, or both. As we sit in nature with our neighbors, wiggling out weeds, we can learn various strategic weeding methods, including learning the identification and root structure of each weed species we target, then when, how, and where, they would disperse if we let them. We can also learn which weeds we can nibble on. Then we learn the reason we are weeding, which is to help the re-spreading of the declining local, wild plants, and the wild animals that are adapted to the declining plants, those weeds were pushing out. Then on the way out we can learn the art of “weed walking”, where we pull the weeds away from the declining wild plants, while we walk, hardly losing a step.

This is a world that we could be moving back towards with each of our community gatherings in nature, where we are contributing to the natural community as a mutualistic member of that community, rather than a parasitic or predatory member of that community. Could this model go viral? Could it spread around the globe better and last longer than Pokeman Go? Why not?

I ask that people preregister to ensure that the group size is manageable both for me and the mosses. e-mail me at ecostewart@gmail.com or phone me at 206 932-7225 (currently only land line).

While the program is free, Stewart appreciates any useful support that the human community gives him that will help the growth of the success of his efforts to promote the protection and recovery our most precious and unique local natural communities that our misguided human culture has increasingly been degrading and diminishing.